NEW YORK, Nov. 28 – Biotechnology company Pluvita has signed a three-year, non-exclusive deal for access to AxCell Bioscience’s ProChart database, which contains information on signal transduction pathways in the human proteome, AxCell said Wednesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The database includes the map of the WW protein domain family, a complete human domain family involved in signal transduction. ProChart also includes protein pathway information from several other domain families, such as PDZ, SH2 and SH3.
Pluvita, a small privately-held company based in Bethesda, Md., said it would use the database in a number of its research and drug discovery initiatives, in areas such as cancer, reproductive health, and diabetes.
“We have a systems biology approach for discovering unique genes involved in pathogenesis,” said Pluvita CEO Gary Kurtzman. “Our discoveries will lead us to the identification of possible pathways, and in order to complete that you need to know what other proteins are involved. That’s what AxCell’s database will provide.”
ProChart was launched in June as part of InforMax’s GenoMax bioinformatics system. Pluvita’s subscription, though, is limited to the ProChart database.
AxCell Biosciences of Princeton, NJ, is a subsidiary of Cytogen.