Compugen Ltd. announced that Abbott Laboratories has extended its agreement with Compugen, under which Abbott utilizes Compugen's technology for the accelerated identification and prioritization of novel drug targets across multiple therapeutic areas.

Under the terms of the agreement, Abbott will receive several updates of Compugen's Genecarta genome, transcriptome and proteome database, which also includes an intuitive graphical user interface and flexible query tools.

"Compugen has demonstrated a continued commitment to the success of our research partnership," said Don Halbert, director, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology, Abbott Laboratories. "Compugen's advanced platforms add value to our existing discovery programmes, as well as help Abbott accelerate the identification of new drug targets."

Erez Chimovits, executive vice president, Commercial Operations of Compugen Ltd., said, "We are looking forward to continuing this collaboration, announced at the beginning of 2003. This agreement is a further validation of Compugen's strength in combining computational technologies with life science in order to increase the probability of successfully bringing drugs to market. We are pleased that Abbott has once again chosen our solutions to advance their research efforts."

The Genecarta system is based on the application of Compugen's LEADS computational biology platform to publicly available genomic and expressed data, providing advanced database structure, intuitive viewing and analysis tools for life science researchers to mine the vast amounts of resulting biological data.