Odyssey Thera Granted U.S. Patent for Pathway-Based Drug Discovery Strategy
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Odyssey Thera, Inc. has announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent No. 7,062,219 for single- and multi-color protein-fragment complementation assays (PCA) in drug discovery.
The patent provides methods for constructing diverse assays in live cells for detecting dynamic changes in protein complexes and pathways.
Additional methods describe application of these assays to automated, high throughput and high content screening.
Broad claims cover the construction of assays on known and unknown pathways, using a wide array of reporter systems, expression strategies and assay formats.
"This patent describes a unique and flexible strategy for drug discovery," said John K. Westwick, Ph.D., patent co-author and Odyssey Thera President and CSO.
"The strategy achieves three key goals: first, a massive increase in the scope of cell-based, biologically relevant screens for drug discovery and profiling."
"Importantly, the claims are not limited to particular targets, cell types or assay formats, and we've constructed assays for all major target classes."
"Second, we describe how these tools are applied to high throughput drug discovery, enabling the screening of large compound libraries."
"Finally, we demonstrate that the assays accurately reflect the activity of drug targets in their native context, resulting in screening hits of greater quality and likelihood of success."
Professor Stephen Michnick of the University of Montreal, PCA inventor and co-author on the patent, added, "I originally set out to address the need for a universal approach to study the dynamics of biochemical pathways."
"That it could also be used to decipher drug actions on signaling pathways was implicitly understood, but I am gratified that this patent and our recent publications demonstrate the practical realization of how this technology can be broadly applied to improve pharmaceutical R&D."
This patent adds to over forty issued patents and pending applications covering broad aspects of pathway-based discovery technologies, and solidifies Odyssey Thera's leadership position in these fields.
