Prometheus
Laboratories Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company, announced
today the execution of an oncology-focused mutational analysis services agreement
with Bayer Schering Pharma AG, Germany,
a worldwide leading pharmaceutical company. The addition of this mutational
analysis services agreement broadens Bayer's oncology-focused molecular and pathway
activation profiling collaboration with Prometheus to include comprehensive
mutational analyses. The expanded information derived from this agreement has
the potential to improve patient stratification in clinical studies and
accelerate the development of novel oncology diagnostic and therapeutic
products.
Under the terms of this agreement, Bayer will provide
clinical samples, sourced from clinical studies, and Prometheus will perform mutational
analyses that characterize the presence or absence of existing and novel
cancer-relevant mutations in these samples.
Prometheus will be compensated based on the number and
complexity of mutational analyses it completes for Bayer.
"This agreement represents further validation of the
importance of our oncology focused CEER and mutational analysis
platforms," said Joseph M. Limber, President and Chief Executive Officer
of Prometheus. "The combination of our mutational analysis and CEER
platforms that this agreement represents is an important step to providing a
more comprehensive analysis to Bayer, that may result in improved selection of
patients who will benefit the most from specific drug candidates Bayer is
developing. We believe this collaboration has the potential to ultimately
result in improved outcomes for patients." Prometheus and Bayer entered
into a research collaboration and license agreement in March of this year. This
collaboration partners Prometheus' proprietary oncology diagnostic CEER
platform with Bayer's broad oncology pipeline with the objective of stratifying
patients to appropriate drug candidates and accelerating the development and market
introduction of novel oncology therapeutic and diagnostic products. Using
functional pathway analysis, based on Prometheus' CEER platform, promises to
enable a comprehensive understanding of tumors leading to improved patient
stratification in clinical studies and improved utility and efficacy of
targeted cancer therapeutics.
Prometheus' proprietary CEER platform measures the
expression and activation of specific cancer pathways with high levels of
sensitivity and specificity using tissue or blood samples. The CEER platform
has shown great promise to improve the selection and evaluation of the efficacy
of drugs in development and in the clinical setting to enable real-time
molecular profiling, the monitoring of drug effectiveness in the use of a
growing number of targeted therapies.