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Study Experimentally Validates Compugen's Computationally Predicted Drug Target for Multiple Myeloma

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This story originally ran on May 11.

Israeli drug and diagnostics discovery firm Compugen said today that it has completed initial experimental validation for membrane protein CGEN-928 as a drug target for the treatment of multiple myeloma.

The company said that the protein's expression profile indicates that it might also be useful as a diagnostic and prognostic marker for multiple myeloma.

Compugen said that it first identified CGEN-928 as a potential target through its computational technology, called the Monoclonal Antibody Targets Discovery Platform, which predicted that the protein would demonstrate high expression levels in multiple myeloma samples compared to normal tissue.

The recently completed studies confirmed that CGEN-928 does show broad expression in human multiple myeloma tumor cells, including drug-resistant and primary tumor cell lines. Compugen said that it has filed patent applications covering the use of CGEN-928 for these and additional therapeutic and diagnostic purposes.

"These early results obtained with CGEN-928 are very encouraging, especially given the fact that this protein is showing high levels of expression in many multiple myeloma tumors that are very drug resistant and highly aggressive," James Berenson, medical and scientific director of the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research — where much of the study was conducted — said in a statement.

A malignancy of the bone marrow, multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer after non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It represents roughly 1 percent of all cancers and 2 percent of all cancer deaths.