TEL AVIV--Compugen announced recently that it had met the first milestone in its Leads platform agreement with Parke-Davis ahead of schedule, which activated an undisclosed milestone payment from Parke-Davis, a division of Warner-Lambert.
Leads is a computational biology platform for the modeling and understanding of molecular mechanisms of life. Late last year Parke-Davis became the first of a planned total of three major pharmaceutical company partners for the Leads platform, under a multiyear, multimillion-dollars-per-year agreement.
"The Leads platform is already proving to be a significant factor in furthering our genomic research efforts," said Wendell Wierenga, Parke-Davis senior vice-president of preclinical research, development, and technologies.
As part of its Leads effort, Compugen has just opened a US R&D and partner support center in Jamesburg, NJ. Led by Simchon Faigler, cofounder and vice-president of technology, the new facility will house a multidisciplinary team of research and application scientists focusing on further development of the Leads Platform.
The initial focus for the development of Leads was the extraction of meaningful information, such as new genes, proteins, and splice variants, from expressed and genomic data. Current development efforts include improved chip design and pattern recognition from chip and proteomics expression results.