Compugen Ltd. (NASDAQ: CGEN) announced today the discovery and
experimental validation of CGEN-671, a new drug target for multiple
epithelial tumors. CGEN-671 is a membrane splice variant of CD55, a
known drug target for gastric cancer for which monoclonal antibody (mAb)
therapeutics are in clinical development by others. The potential
application of CGEN-671 as a drug target was initially predicted in
silico by Compugen through the use of its Monoclonal Antibody
Targets Discovery Platform; the predicted molecule was then validated
experimentally in multiple epithelial tumors. Epithelial tumors, also
referred to as carcinomas, account for approximately 85% of all cancers,
including the ten most prevalent cancers in the western world, such as
breast, colorectal, lung, ovary, prostate and skin. Compugen has filed
patent applications covering this novel splice variant and its various
therapeutic and diagnostic utilities.
Initial experimental studies confirmed the existence of the predicted
CGEN-671 transcript (mRNA) and demonstrated that, compared with normal
tissue samples, it is highly expressed in colon carcinoma tissue.
Furthermore, in these mRNA experiments, CGEN-671’s expression level in
various healthy tissues was up to 200 times lower than the expression
level of the previously known cancer target CD55, suggesting that the
Compugen discovered splice variant should be a superior drug target
candidate for cancer treatment. In addition, the in silico
prediction of CGEN-671 identified a unique sequence present in
CGEN-671’s extracellular domain that is not present in CD55. This
sequence allows for the development of antibodies that specifically bind
to CGEN-671 and do not recognize CD55.