SAN DIEGO--Privately held biopharmaceutical company Immusol announced its first genomics-based research collaboration with Pfizer to validate new therapeutic targets in the Pfizer drug discovery pipeline. A 1995 collaboration between the two firms to develop a gene therapy for the treatment of HIV will not be renewed, Immusol also announced. Instead, Immusol will continue to develop the HIV therapy in collaboration with Flossie Wong-Staal's laboratory at the University of California San Diego.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Pfizer will provide candidate gene target sequence information to Immusol for the design of specific ribozymes to each target. Immusol will deliver the ribozymes to mammalian cells, thereby generating an in vivo model to measure the loss of each selected target gene product and evaluate its function in disease. Financial terms were not disclosed.