There are still no reliable markers for the number one cause of death in heart disease and stroke
Compugen announces a collaboration with the Mayo Clinic in the USA for the discovery and validation (validation) of new markers for diagnosing the presence of unstable sclerotic plaque for use as early markers for heart disease and stroke.
Cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death in the industrialized world and their results have a direct and indirect cost estimated at over 430 billion dollars in the US in 2007. Unstable sclerotic plaque is the most common cause of complications in cases of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke. Currently, there are no diagnostic tests that identify patients with unstable sclerotic plaque, therefore the finding of diagnostic markers to identify these patients will be a significant medical breakthrough.
Compugen will use its unique search engines to predict and validate diagnostic markers associated with active atherosclerosis. Compugen will integrate into the analysis that you will make biological data that you will receive from the Mayo Clinic with its unique computational and clinical data. Compugen will receive exclusive commercialization rights for any product resulting from this collaboration, and Mayo Clinic will share in the revenue.
"The ability to reliably detect the presence of unstable sclerotic plaque is known as a major diagnostic need that currently has no answer. Therefore, using the unique biological predictive capabilities, which Compugen has developed for over a decade, together with relevant data from a world-renowned medical center is an extraordinary opportunity for us," said Dr. Anat Cohen-Deig, VP of Diagnostics and Therapeutic Targets. "This is another example of how the use of Compugen's search engine approach allows you to focus on one area after another, in order to enable rapid breakthroughs in a wide variety of diagnostic and medicinal fields, such as the search engines we recently announced for the discovery of molecules that bind to and activate GPCRs, drug protein candidates, new biomarkers for drug toxicity and drug antibodies", concluded Dr. Cohen-Deig.
