AVEO & Lilly collaborate on clinical drug response

PRLog (Press Release) – Dec 05, 2007 – US cancer biotechnology company AVEO Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, Massachusetts) has signed a collaborative agreement with Eli Lilly to use AVEO's Human Response Platform in a pilot project to identify patient populations likely to be responsive to a cancer drug being developed by Lilly. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The collaboration is focused on identifying genetic profiles that correlate with drug response in order to guide the drug’s clinical development. AVEO says that its Human Response Platform gives improved prediction of human response compared with traditional xenograft models, which “have proven to be non-predictive of efficacy, often leading to expensive and time consuming hit or miss outcomes in clinical trials”.

The Platform is based on genetically defined mouse models of human cancer. Each model is engineered to contain signature genetic mutations that are present in human disease. The resultant tumours acquire common and distinct spontaneous mutations as they progress, resulting in natural genetic variation akin to that found in primary human tumours. This tumour-to-tumour genetic variation makes it possible to identify genetic correlations between responding and non-responding tumour populations, and to apply such genetic profiles in clinical development. Submitted by www.jobs4dd.com, for latest jobs and news in the clinical research and drug development fields.