Compugen discovers new drug targets for cancer therapeutics

The newly identified targets were initially predicted and selected in silico utilizing the company’s monoclonal antibody therapeutic targets platform and subsequently were experimentally validated. In addition, the company announced that further experimental validation of the therapeutic potential has been initiated for five of these targets.

According to the company, this group of novel targets offers the opportunity for advancing the development of antibody biotherapeutics for a wide range of oncologic diseases, such as ovarian cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer, multiple myeloma, acute and chronic leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

All the new targets are said to be membrane-bound molecules which have been shown to display differential RNA expression in various tumor versus healthy samples. In addition, a number of them are splice variant molecules, the existence of which had initially been predicted by the company’s Leads platform.