CombinatoRx Incorporated and Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, Inc. entered into a multi-year research and license agreement for the discovery, development, and potential commercialisation by Angiotech of drug devices and interventional medicine products built from innovative drug combinations. The parties anticipate the collaboration will initially focus on vascular, orthopedic and general surgery indications.

According to a company release, the agreement unites CombinatoRx's experience in the systematic discovery of potential combination drugs with Angiotech's expertise in drug-device combinations and local interventional medicines. CombinatoRx has granted Angiotech an option to evaluate and exclusively license compounds selected by Angiotech from the CombinatoRx clinical and pre clinical pipeline and proprietary Chalice database of drug combinations for development and potential commercialisation in certain medical device and local interventional applications.

CombinatoRx has also agreed to deploy its proprietary combination high throughput screening (cHTS) technology in a joint multi-year research initiative to identify novel drug combinations for multiple areas of strategic importance to Angiotech. Intellectual property from this research project will be jointly owned, and exclusively cross-licensed to CombinatoRx for systemic therapies and therapies outside the Angiotech field.