Plexera Bioscience and MitoSciences Inc. Announce Collaboration on Mitochondrial Array
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Plexera Bioscience LLC, and MitoSciences Inc., developers of antibodies and assays for understanding mitochondrial function, has announced that they have entered into an agreement that outlines a commercial path for an antibody array product which is enabled with Plexera's ProteomicProcessor™ and MitoSciences' proprietary antibodies.
This product development is in conjunction with a separate and previously announced agreement with the Medical University of South Carolina in which researchers there are building a protein expression profiling assay with Mitosciences' antibodies and Plexera's ProteomicProcessor™.
"Changes in mitochondrial proteins are known to be markers for certain pathologies and many adverse drug effects. We feel that by combining MitoSciences' well characterized antibodies and Plexera's ProteomicProcessor™ we will have an assay that will have significant time and cost advantages over existing technologies.
Perhaps as important will be our ability to identify and characterize multiple protein markers in one assay," said Dr. Craig Beeson, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at MUSC and the Principle Investigator on this project.
"We are excited to be working along side of MitoSciences and believe that combining their content with our detection platform has very exciting commercial prospects," said Dr. Tim Londergan, President and Chief Operating Officer of Plexera.
"This has the potential to become a mainstream assay in the ADME and toxicology market as pharmaceutical companies desperately need to find new ways to screen and eliminate problematic compounds sooner in the process."
The total U.S. ADME/Tox market was estimated to be $1.1 billion in 2003 and is expected to grow to $2.8 billion by 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of 17.2%.
Failures of pipeline drugs due to ADME and toxicology are estimated to be in the 50% to 60% range, making it the number one reason for preclinical attrition, according to market research firm Business Insights, Ltd.
High-throughout technologies that quickly and efficiently identify toxic drug compounds promise to increase the success rate of new pharmaceutical drug development.
"This agreement is the first step in what we hope to be a long and prosperous commercial relationship with Plexera. Plexera's interest in accessing our proprietary antibody library for use with the ProteomicProcessor™ further validates the market's demand for more advanced mitochondrial related assays," said John Audette, President of MitoSciences.
