Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc and Bayer HealthCare AG, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bayer AG, announced that their five-year research collaboration is concluding on October 31, 2003 as planned. During the collaboration, Bayer progressed more than 180 targets into various stages of assay configuration and drug discovery. The companies have amended the agreement to provide Bayer with extended access for up to seven years to a pool of 280 additional proprietary targets which have for technical reasons not yet been configured into assays. As new technical information emerges Bayer can select targets from the pool and progress them into drug discovery or return them to Millennium.
In addition, Millennium can select a certain number of targets from the pool each year. At the end of the seven year period the targets remaining in the pool will be returned to Millennium.
The alliance, established in 1998, is believed to be one of the largest in the field of pharmaceutical drug discovery, with the primary goal of identifying 225 important new "drug targets" relevant to cardiovascular disease, cancer, pain, hematologic and viral diseases, urinary incontinence and benign prostatic hypertrophy. During the groundbreaking collaboration, the companies identified more than 460 drug targets having a novel sequence or novel disease annotation. Multiple projects have progressed to various stages of discovery, including two target projects where preclinical candidates have been identified.
"Drug targets" are proteins expressed by human genes which can be used to discover and develop small molecule drugs. Prior to the complete sequencing of the human genome, pharmaceutical companies relied on only 500 drug targets based on human genes for use in the development of medical therapies.
Millennium and Bayer have led the industry in industrializing the drug discovery process through the application of large-scale and production-oriented approaches, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the genome, characterization of thousands of genes, categorization of target druggability and disease relevance and prioritization of high quality, novel targets for drug discovery and development.