Transparent Corporation of Japan, and Molecular Response Sign Key Collaboration and Supply Agreement

Under the terms, parties will jointly introduce a novel 3-dimensional cell culture system based on TRP’s patented 3D cell culture plate design and manufacturing technologies, and MRL’s proprietary bank of ‘living’ tumor cells and quantitative high content platforms. The platform will be marketed under TRP’s “Cell-able Oncology(TM)” brand with key contract research support for preclinical and clinical trial applications by MRL.

Current strategies for developing new anticancer drugs rely heavily on preclinical testing in cancer cell lines and their derived in-vivo xenograft models. A significant limitation to current preclinical testing is the use of highly passaged cancer cell lines grown on plastic.
Improved preclinical models are required to advance our understanding of the molecular aberrations that underpin cancer and are critical for developing and deploying targeted therapies to improve patients’ lives.

Cell-able Oncology(TM) allows primary tumor cells to grow in 3-dimensional cultures that more closely resemble in-vivo like conditions. Models grown in 3-dimensional culture conditions coupled with molecular characterization provide a stronger correlation to clinical outcomes than conventional preclinical anticancer drug testing.

“We are very pleased to collaborate with Molecular Response to provide key enabling technologies to pharmaceutical researchers and medical professionals by introducing Cell-able Oncology(TM),” said Transparent CEO Rocky Kato. “Transparent and Molecular Response will present collaborative research outcomes at the AACR Annual Meeting to be held in Chicago from March 31 to April 4, 2012. Molecular Response pharmaceutical research services combined with Cell-able Oncology(TM) will provide researchers the right tools to perform transformative drug discovery with patient-derived primary tumor cells and focused molecular targets that enable drug sensitivity testing that is strongly correlated to clinical outcomes.”