Compugen Ltd., incorporated on February 10, 1993, is a therapeutic discovery company. The Company focuses on infrastructure to discover drug targets and develop therapeutics. The Company is engaged in the research, development and commercialization of therapeutic and product candidates. The Company's pipeline primarily consists of early and preclinical stage immuno-oncology programs based on drug targets discovered by the Company, primarily immune checkpoint and myeloid protein target candidates. These programs are focused on the development of cancer immunotherapy drugs with potential to harness the immune system to provide treatment solutions in areas of unmet medical needs in various cancer types and patient populations, both as monotherapy and in combination with other drugs.
The Company's pipeline also includes a preclinical stage fusion protein autoimmune product candidate. Its fields of focus are oncology and immunology, with emphasis on its discovery capabilities on immuno-oncology. Its focus in immuno-oncology are immune checkpoint targets, and to focus on myeloid targets present in the tumor micro-environment, in both cases with the objective of unleashing the potential of the natural anti-tumor immune response. It offers four therapies approved for the treatment of cancer that target immune checkpoint proteins: Yervoy, an antibody treatment targeting CTLA-4, Keytruda, an antibody therapy targeting PD-1, for the treatment of advanced melanoma and has also been approved for the treatment of first-line metastatic non-small cell lung cancer patients expressing PD-L1 and metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Opdivo, an antibody therapy targeting PD-1 is for the treatment of advanced melanoma has also been approved for the treatment of multiple cancers, including advanced lung cancer, metastatic renal cell carcinoma, hodgkin lymphoma and head and neck cancer, and Tecentriq, an antibody therapy targeting PD-L1 for the treatment of urothelial carcinoma and to treat metastatic non-small cell lung cancer
The Company's antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) cancer therapy destroys cancer cells by harnessing the binding of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) to deliver cytotoxic agents, called the payload, directly to the cancer cells. ADCs are designed to destroy cells displaying the cancer target protein. As of December 31, 2016, there were approximately 50 ADCs in clinical testing. In autoimmune diseases, the Company's other area of focus is on a program, CGEN-15001. CGEN-15001 is an Fc fusion protein based on CGEN-15001T, which has been engineered to be fused to the Fc domain of an IgG (antibody) protein to provide a half-life in the blood and has drug like properties. CGEN-15001T is an immune checkpoint discovered by it. CGEN-15001 has been shown to be effective in treating several autoimmune diseases in animal models, including models of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and psoriasis. mAb therapeutics is a class of biological drugs that harnesses the exquisite specificity and potent binding properties of antibodies to create a mono-specific antibody (drug) that binds to the drug target of interest and thereby limits the potential for off-target toxicity that is seen with small molecule drugs.
The Company's pipeline program allows for target validation and development of multiple therapeutic candidates based on its drug targets. It ranges from target validation to preclinical studies primarily in the field of immuno-oncology, with an additional Fc fusion therapeutic program for autoimmune diseases. The objective of the Pipeline Program is to advance the validation of its-discovered drug target candidates to generate antigen-binding (Ab) therapeutic drug candidates against such targets and to further advance selected therapeutic candidates into preclinical and clinical testing. Modulation of the immune system in various therapeutic applications, such as treating various types of cancer, inhibiting autoimmune diseases and prolonging graft survival in organ transplant recipients.
The Company's therapeutic pipeline program consists of mAb target candidates discovered by using its immuno-oncology predictive discovery methodologies and an autoimmune Fc fusion protein product candidate based on one of these target candidates. Immune checkpoint target candidates disclosed by the Company includes CGEN-15001T, CGEN-15022, CGEN-15029 and CGEN-15137, all of which are at various stages of research and therapeutic development, internally or with a partner, for oncology and CGEN-15001 fusion protein for autoimmune disease. CGEN-15001 is an Fc fusion protein drug candidate for autoimmune diseases, consisting of the fusion of the extracellular region of CGEN-15001T to an IgG Fc domain.
The Company's focused discovery program, the immune checkpoint discovery program, is directed towards the discovery of members of the B7/CD28 co-inhibitory proteins, which has therapeutic potential in both cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its predictive discovery platforms for the discovery of novel protein members belonging to various known and clinically important protein families. These discovery platforms include two of its infrastructure capabilities: a sequence analysis platform-LEADS, and a disease-association platform-MED, a capability, which is enhanced in the LINKS platform.
The Company's technology platform, LEADS is a silico view of the human transcriptome, proteome, and peptidome and serves as an infrastructure for the discovery of genes, transcripts and proteins. LEADS provide gene, transcript, protein and peptide prediction through modeling of various biological phenomena, such as alternative splicing, antisense, fusion gene, ribonucleic acid (RNA) editing and polymorphisms. The LEADS platform is leveraged for discovery by integrating genome annotation data and genome-aligned gene expression data. Its technology platform, MED is an in silico disease expression database integrating more than 70,000 microarray experiments, which were grouped into approximately 1,400 sets as of December 31, 2016. Each set is a unification of different experiments of tissues with the same clinical relevance, including normal tissues, malignant tissues and tissues from drug treated patients.
The Company's technology platform, LINKS is designed to allow characterization and differentiation of drug target candidates. LINKS is designed to integrate and analyze various amounts of patients' disease and clinical data to associate drug targets with disease conditions, clinical attributes and disease-associated mechanisms of action. LINKS is applied to analyze its pipeline of immune checkpoint target candidates and to compare them to one another as well as to differentiate them from known immune checkpoints. This analysis includes expression in immune subpopulations, regulatory mechanisms and cancer-specific immune signatures, and enables them to compare and differentiate its portfolio of immune checkpoint programs. It develops various biomarker discovery approaches based on algorithms for the discovery of various types of biomarkers. The key approaches relate to the discovery of drug-induced toxicity biomarkers, and for the discovery of potential biomarkers for its selected immune checkpoint target candidates.
The Company offers various target discovery platforms, which includes the discovery of b7/cd28-like immune checkpoints, antibody-drug conjugate cancer therapy discovery platform, other discovery approaches for immunomodulatory proteins and biomarker discovery approaches. The discovery platform uses specialized algorithms designed to identify a set of characteristics of protein family at genomic and protein levels as well as gene expression profiles. The output of the platform includes CGEN-15029, poliovirus receptor related immunoglobulin domain containing (PVRIG), and CGEN-15137, TIGIT, as well as other candidates. The Company has developed platforms to discover various types of immunomodulators, based on modeling of two biological phenomena, which include an evolutionary model, which modeled the interplay between the immune system and intruding pathogens. The second modeled the role of tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs). It has developed the platform to identify membrane proteins that has the potential to internalize and that are expressed on cancer cells and have expression on healthy cells, in order to allow the ADC drug to attack the tumor and spare healthy tissues. It has developed various biomarker discovery approaches based on specialized algorithms for the discovery of various type of biomarkers. The key approaches relate to the discovery of drug-induced toxicity biomarkers, and for the discovery of potential biomarkers for its selected immune checkpoint target candidates.
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The company trades on NASDAQ exchange. The company headquarter is located in Israel. The company was established in the 1993.| Ticker | CGEN |
| Long Name | Compugen Ltd. |
| Short Name | Compugen |