Compugen Develops Intracellular Drug Delivery Platform

The newly developed IDD discovery platform enables the in silico identification of peptide sequences that are predicted to have the potential to penetrate the cell membrane. The new platform consists of various components from company’s existing computational biology infrastructure and a series of machine learning algorithms designed for the platform.

In a validation run of the platform, a number of peptides having various physico-chemical properties relevant for different specific uses were predicted and experimentally evaluated. Their ability to penetrate into cells was assessed by two independent well-accepted in-vitro assay systems. In these evaluations, more than twenty of the peptides were shown to possess cell penetrating activity both by visual image analysis through confocal microscopy and quantitative measures performed by flow cytometry analysis.

In addition to the substantial opportunity represented by ‘therapeutic cargo-carrying’, Compugen intends to integrate its Intracellular Drug Delivery discovery platform with its other in silico therapeutic peptide discovery capabilities, such as the DAC Blockers platform, in order to create dual function peptides. These dual function peptides will be designed to both penetrate the cell membrane, and provide the required therapeutic intervention.

Anat Cohen-Dayag, president and CEO of Compugen, said: “The use of peptides for human therapy is one of the fastest growing segments of pharmaceuticals. Therefore the predictive discovery of peptides for important therapeutic needs has been a focus of our research efforts for the past few years and we are extremely pleased by our continued broadening and deepening capabilities in peptide discovery.

“In addition to the cell penetrating peptide platform being announced today, we previously announced validated platforms for the predictive discovery of peptide ligands for GPCRs which are by far the largest family of receptors for drugs, peptides that block proteins from disease associated conformations, viral peptides for human diseases and therapeutic peptides in various fields of therapy. We have no doubt that our widely applicable peptide discovery capabilities are unique in our industry.”