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Angiotech Announces Drug Discovery And Development Agreement with CombinatoRx

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Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has announced a license and research collaboration agreement with CombinatoRx, Incorporated focused on the selection and development of combination pharmaceutical compounds for Angiotech's local interventional therapy applications.

The collaboration significantly expands Angiotech's library of potentially useful drug compounds by providing Angiotech with access to CombinatoRx's compound library of over 2 million analyzed combinations of known pharmaceuticals, for use in various interventional medicine fields.

CombinatoRx uses a high throughput screening system to discover proprietary combinations of two or more drugs that are able to affect important pharmaceutical pathways with the aim of achieving greater efficacy than can be achieved through the use of a single drug alone.

The agreement provides Angiotech with immediate access to CombinatoRx's combination pharmaceutical compounds to target common problems in areas such as vascular, orthopedic and general surgery, including specifically, peripheral artery disease, coronary stenting and joint diseases.

There will also be joint research effort of up to five years designed to combine CombinatoRx's combination drug discovery platform and capabilities with Angiotech's expertise in local drug selection and delivery across a number of disease areas including orthopedics, gynecology, vascular restenosis, and local tumor cell management.

“Our license and exclusive relationship with CombinatoRx provides us immediate access to a large and comprehensive library of combination compounds,” said William Hunter, M.D. MSc, President and CEO of Angiotech Pharmaceuticals.

“We believe there are several CombinatoRx combination compounds that will enhance our leadership position in repurposing known drugs to treat local vascular and orthopedic disease and that may be of immediate use in certain of our key product development programs, including the treatment of restenosis in coronary stent applications.”

“In addition, using CombinatoRx's proprietary platform and approach, we can rapidly screen a large number of unique drug combinations in our proven biological models and assays.”

“We believe working with CombinatoRx will enable us to make fast, and most importantly, scientifically informed decisions for commercialization of products containing combinations of two or more drugs.”

“Given that many drugs interact with one another in unexpected ways, we believe it will become ever more important to conduct such a scientific approach to discover the best pharmaceutical solutions for local interventional therapies.”

“This collaboration represents a new spectrum of pharmaceutical options,” said Rui Avelar, M.D., Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs and Communications of Angiotech.

“This sophisticated approach to drug discovery enables us to find combinations that are not simply additive in effect but potentially superior in their combined form.”

“We plan to quickly take advantage of the collaboration and CombinatoRx's approach to enhance our clinical initiatives.”

As consideration for the license and collaboration, Angiotech will provide CombinatoRx initial consideration of $27 million in cash, and will make a concurrent $15 million investment in CombinatoRx.

CombinatoRx will receive milestone payments and royalties from Angiotech for each combination pharmaceutical compound successfully developed and commercialized by Angiotech or Angiotech's commercialization partners.

The intellectual property developed during the research collaboration will be jointly owned, but exclusively licensed to Angiotech in its fields of drug-device combinations and certain local drug delivery products, and to CombinatoRx primarily for systemic therapies, and for a limited number of drug-device combination fields.