HORSHOLM, Denmark, April 24, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Pharmexa's 83.3% owned subsidiary Inoxell A/S today announced that the European Patent Office has issued an acceptance of Inoxell's patent on its scaffold technology.
The European acceptance significantly strengthens Inoxell's patented CellScreen(TM) technology platform, which is a versatile genetic approach for manipulating biological processes inside mammalian cells to enable discovery of novel targets for drug action. CellScreen(TM) generates effector peptides that modulate a disease or cellular pathway of choice in mammalian cells, and thus leads directly to drug targets that are functionally validated. This is distinct from many genomics or proteomics techniques that mainly generate correlative information, e.g. through the mapping of expression patterns in diseased versus normal cells. The output of CellScreen(TM) is a peptide/target pair that is directly amenable for traditional high throughput screens used to identify drug candidates from libraries of small molecules.
The expression of small, biologically active peptides inside mammalian cells is hampered by short half-life of the peptides. Inoxell's proprietary scaffold technology solves this problem, thus significantly increasing the chance of success. Furthermore Inoxell's proprietary scaffold technology has the additional advantage of targeting the peptide expression to distinct cellular compartments.
Dr. Peter Kristensen, CEO of Inoxell said: "This is an important step for Inoxell. The approval of our Scaffold Technology Patent complements our already issued European Patent covering the CellScreen(TM)technology to form a strong basis for our business."
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