Thursday, March 29, 2012

Compugen Ltd. (CGEN) Announces San Francisco Operations for Developing Monoclonal Antibody Drug Candidates

Yesterday, leading therapeutic product discovery company Compugen, Inc. announced it has established development operations in South San Francisco for oncology and immunology monoclonal antibody (mAb) drug candidates against targets discovered by parent company Compugen Ltd.

Additionally, Compugen Ltd. announced the appointment of Mary Haak-Frendscho, Ph.D. as the executive chairperson of Compugen, Inc. and John J. Hunter, Ph.D. as the company’s site head and vice president of antibody R&D, effective April 1.

Compugen, Inc.’s new South San Francisco operations will be located in purpose-built facilities with relevant laboratory equipment recently secured by the company. Strategically placing its mAb operations in the birthplace of biotech will give the company access to some of the best biologics talents in the industry, as well as supportive infrastructure. It is anticipated that these new capabilities will additionally increase the number of mAb product candidates developed against novel Compugen-discovered targets, as the company will be able to perform key activities more efficiently in-house compared to exclusively using third parties as previously intended.

Compugen is an industry leader in therapeutic product discovery, and the company’s focus is on therapeutic proteins and monoclonal antibodies to address unmet needs in the immunology and oncology fields for Compugen and its partners. The company’s discovery efforts are based on systematic in silico (by computer) product candidate prediction and selection followed by experimental validation, with selected product candidates being advanced in the company’s pipeline program to the pre-IND stage.

Compugen’s business model chiefly involves collaborations that cover the further development and commercialization of Compugen-discovered product candidates and various forms of research and discovery agreements – both resulting in potential milestone payments, product sales royalties, and other forms of revenue sharing for Compugen.

For more information, visit the company’s corporate Web site at www.cgen.com

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