The tremendous commercial and medical value in finding new indications for existing drugs has been well recognized by the industry for many years. One very important advantage of this approach is that it may be possible to advance from demonstration of efficacy in vivo directly to Phase II clinical trials, since in many cases safety will have already been established. For this reason, a number of companies have been very active in this area.
Compugen is using its unique approach of combining multidisciplinary experts in medicine, biology, physics and computer sciences to identify new indications for drug molecules. This process is based on three steps: in silico discovery, biological, clinical and intellectual property review, followed by proof of concept in vitro/in vivo validation of selected examples. The in silico discovery part is performed through a discovery platform developed by Compugen for the identification of existing drug targets that are predicted to have important therapeutic indications that are currently not known. This discovery platform analyzes an enormous amount of information and raw data from many different experimental and non-experimental and drug- and disease-specific sources, including gene expression data from tens of thousands of human microarray experiments, known or predicted protein interaction networks, gene regulation data, known or predicted associations between genes and pathologies and other experimental results. The discovery platform allows the integrated analysis of this plethora of information utilizing one comprehensive computational biology platform, thus allowing the linking of experimental results and other data and knowledge from a great many disease areas. Unlike product discovery efforts by others in this area, Compugen’s approach is designed to lead to the identification of those targets predicted to have new indications from amongst all available drugs targets, either in commercial use or undergoing clinical trials.