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news.Isis Pharmaceuticals has announced that Bristol-Myers Squibb has selected a compound from the companies's collaboration as a development candidate. As a result, Isis will receive a $2 million milestone payment.
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The compound was designed to selectively inhibit the production of PCSK9 and could offer a new and complementary mechanism to current lipid-lowering therapies for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
The two companies have an ongoing collaboration to identify antisense drugs that target proprotein convertase subtilisin kexin 9 (PCSK9). The development candidate is an antisense inhibitor of PCSK9 that helps regulate the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream. The selection of this development candidate marks the achievement of the first milestone in this collaboration, which was announced on May 9, 2007.
Brett Monia, vice president of antisense drug discovery of Isis, said: “In less than a year, we have been able to identify and characterize a number of antisense drugs that inhibit PCSK9 in preclinical studies and out of those, identified an attractive development candidate.”