Oncogenex Pharmaceuticals issued key patent

OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: OGXI), today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued United States Patent Number 7,569,551 entitled "Chemo-and Radiation-sensitization of Cancer by Antisense TRPM-2 Oligodeoxynucleotides," on the method of using OncoGenex' lead cancer drug candidate, OGX-011, to treat certain cancers.

The patent, licensed from The University of British Columbia, includes coverage for the method for treating cancers that express the protein clusterin using OGX-011, or any other clusterin antisense oligonucleotide, in combination with any chemotherapeutic agent or radiation therapy. "The issuance of this patent expands our intellectual property estate for treating clusterin-expressing cancers using antisense therapy and provides us with a broad patent that applies well beyond prostate cancer," said Scott Cormack, President and CEO of OncoGenex. "Importantly, given that our current Phase 3 plans include combining OGX-011 with chemotherapy, this patent directly relates to our current method of using OGX-011." OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. owns or has licenses to approximately 67 granted or issued U.S. and foreign patents, and approximately 140 pending U.S. and foreign patent applications worldwide. Composition of matter patents covering OGX-011, OGX-427, SN2310, CSP-9222 and TOCOSOL(TM) have issued in the U.S. and certain other jurisdictions.

Additional patent applications covering all of these products, as well as other technologies, are pending in the U.S. and certain other countries. TRPM-2 is an historical name for clusterin, and survives in some of the earlier patent filings.

Key intellectual property related to OGX-011, OGX-427 and OGX-225 were discovered by The University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Prostate Centre, and were exclusively licensed to OncoGenex. More information about OncoGenex is available at www.oncogenex.com.