AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., said it inked a collaborative agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to work on a new cancer treatment project. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Under the agreement, the parties will use AVEO's Human Response Platform as part of a pilot project to identify patient populations likely to be responsive to an investigational cancer compound currently being developed by Lilly.
The collaboration is focused on identifying genetic profiles that correlate with drug response to more effectively guide the clinical development of one of Lilly's cancer compounds. AVEO's expertise in cancer biology enables the company to pursue highly efficient clinical development strategies in oncology and provides a discovery engine for high-value targets. This approach has resulted in various partnerships, as well as a robust pipeline of proprietary cancer therapies focused on well-validated targets (VEGFR, EGFR), as well as promising novel targets (HGF).
"We are very pleased to collaborate with Lilly to further demonstrate the utility of our Human Response Platform," said Tuan Ha-Ngoc, president and chief executive officer, AVEO. "This latest collaboration with a global pharmaceutical company indicates the opportunity that our unique platform provides our select partners and AVEO to increase the efficiency and probability of success of drug development in oncology. Ultimately we believe this will enable us to bring the right drugs to the right patients."
"Agreements with selected partners to access our novel Human Response Platform augment our overarching business strategy. Through a combination of internal drug discovery and selective in-licensing of targeted therapeutics, AVEO is building a diversified product pipeline and moving toward its vision of becoming a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company," Ha-Ngoc added.
AVEO's Human Response Platform is based on AVEO's proprietary, genetically-defined mouse models of human cancer. Each of these models is engineered to contain signature genetic mutations that are present in human disease. Beyond these cancer-initiating engineered mutations, the resultant tumours acquire common and distinct spontaneous mutations during tumour progression, providing additional natural genetic variation more akin to the range of genetic heterogeneity encountered across different primary human tumours. The tumour-to-tumour genetic variation in the system provides the opportunity to identify genetic correlations between responding and non-responding tumour populations, and to apply such genetic profiles in clinical development. Consequently, compared with traditional xenograft models that have proven to be non-predictive of efficacy, often leading to expensive and time consuming hit or miss outcomes in clinical trials, AVEO's cancer models are improved predictors of human response.
AVEO is a privately held biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of novel, targeted cancer therapeutics. AVEO's proprietary, integrated cancer biology platform enables the company to pursue highly efficient drug development strategies in oncology that increase the probability of clinical success and provides a discovery engine for high-value targets. The company has collaborations with Merck, OSI Pharmaceuticals and Schering-Plough.