Horizon Secures World-Wide Exclusive Patent Position on Core GENESIS™ Platform

Horizon Discovery has announced that it has secured world-wide exclusive rights to a key genetic process behind its GENESIS platform used to create patient-relevant disease models, called X-MAN cell-lines.

Horizon’s claims that its expanding number (100+) of X-MAN™ (Mutant And Normal) cell models allow drug discovery researchers to understand how cancer manifests itself in real patients and develop personalized medicines, diagnostics and theranostic tests that will enable future doctors to tailor individual treatment regimes and follow-up care to the specific needs of cancer patient.

Underlying GENESIS, is a viral-based gene-engineering technology discovered and patented by the University of Washington, which is absolutely essential to generating X-MAN lines efficiently and reproducibly; and now Horizon have exclusive rights to it.

The use of adeno-associated viruses (AAV) in gene engineering was first considered as a means to perform gene-therapy in humans, but Horizon founders, Chris Torrance and Alberto Bardelli, have now brought this technology more widely into the drug discovery process by using it to create patient models; which will help rationalize all aspects of drug development, and therefore the final cost of new cancer therapies.