miRagen, University of Colorado sign microRNA therapeutics agreements

The sponsored research agreement will support the analysis of miRNA and gene expression changes from a study conducted at the University of Colorado Cardiovascular Institute at the UC Denver School of Medicine, ‘Beta Blocker Effects on Remodeling and Gene Expression (BORG).’

The licensing agreement will enable miRagen to commercialise intellectual property associated with discoveries made during the research project.

MiRagen president and CEO William Marshall said that they are extremely pleased to work closely with Bristow and the University of Colorado and to gain access to these unique data in human patients with heart failure.

"This provides us with the ability to analyse miRNA levels, as well as gene expression changes, in a given patient at specific points in time in their disease progression," Marshall said.

"We believe this will provide a very powerful tool in stratifying our miRNA targets and support our mission of developing miRNA-based therapeutics to treat patients with cardiovascular and muscle disease."

CU Cardiovascular Institute co-director, professor of medicine and miRagen co-founder Michael Bristow said that the BORG study performed at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center contains novel information on miRNAs and their relationships to myocardial remodeling and messenger RNA (mRNA) behavior, which will be very useful to miRagen in target selection for their therapeutic miRNA approaches.

"In drug development, animal models are of course very valuable, but for target validation as well as novel target discovery, human data are vitally important,"Bristow said.