Compendia Bioscience: Seeking to share the risk in developing cancer drugs
John Freshley, CBO, Compendia Bioscience
By leveraging the wealth of information in the Oncomine database that many major cancer drug development companies already use, Compendia Bioscience is pursuing a new risk-sharing business model for its biomarker discovery services that are targeted at small biotech companies.
At BIO-Europe 2009, Compendia Bioscience is searching for 10 to 20 potential partners for the risk-sharing program to identify a precisely targeted patient population for a partner’s innovative cancer therapeutic, in exchange for future milestone and/or royalty payments for the successful drug.
“The only way a biotech can succeed and distinguish itself in what has become a very crowded oncology market is to find the population that will respond to its drug,” said John Freshley, CBO for Compendia Bioscience.
“There are possibly 1,000 companies developing a novel cancer therapy, and we all know from past history that there is a 90 percent chance they will fail if they develop their drugs in the standard way,” he told partneringNEWS™ .
“Typically,” he explained, “a company’s trial is conducted across a broad patient population, such as for colon cancer or breast cancer. Yet breast cancer, for example, is not one form of cancer but encompasses many molecular sub-types.”
“We propose looking for the biomarkers that define the specific molecular sub-types likely to respond to the company’s drug,” he reported.
By precision targeting these patient populations, Compendia Biosciences believes its partner companies will increase by 40 to 50 percent the chances of success for a novel therapeutic. The most common example discussed for this approach is Herceptin in breast cancer, but recent data presented at the 2009 ASCO meeting provide confidence that this approach of targeting specific sub-populations may work for many cancer drugs.
Compendia Bioscience is already at the leading edge of the targeted oncology revolution having assembled genomic patient profiles from more than 35,000 cancer patients into a database and software product called Oncomine. Oncomine and the Compendia Bioscience team have been involved in several groundbreaking cancer research discoveries included the identification of gene fusions in prostate cancer and the identification of AGTR1 as a novel breast cancer target.
Compendia risk-sharing program proposes to profile partner compounds across a cell line panel of 240 cancer cell lines for which it has the full genomic characterization and discovery biomarkers from the resulting sensitivity and resistance data. These biomarkers are then mapped to the Oncomine database to identify enriched populations for these biomarkers and guide clinical development strategy.
“This is the critical experiment for any targeted cancer drug,” said Freshley, “but this experiment in itself is a significant investment, especially for smaller companies. But, we believe so strongly in its value that we are willing to share the risk on the most promising compounds.”
“This large experiment and Compendia’s expert analysis create several benefits for the partner company, said Freshley, “the likelihood of a successful clinical trial jumps significantly. There is an opportunity to run a smaller trial that is statistically valid. And further downstream, the company will have data and insights to differentiate the drug to potential licensors or in the market to oncologists, ” he explained.
On why Compendia is pursuing this new business model, Freshley answered: “We’ve been really successful in selling our products and services to big pharma. We sit side by side with scientists at major pharmaceutical companies all over the world helping them to understand the specific opportunities for their compounds by personalizing their data.”
“But our service and access fees tend to be a little out of reach for most biotechs,” said Freshley. “The only way many biotechs can afford to do this is if we share the risk and we are now in a financial position to do just that.”
“We are seeking to invest in what we believe are the most promising novel cancer compounds that can have a dramatic difference on the lives of cancer patients, and there are some great compounds in smaller companies that deserve all of the tools and all of the science we can bring to give them the best chance to succeed,” he reported.
The biotech partner wins in receiving a highly targeted population for their drug with an improved likelihood of success, Compendia Bioscience wins with the potential upside that comes with the success of the compound, “and the patients win because we have identified them as highly likely to be sensitive to a specific therapeutic for their disease,” he added.
Freshley will include the Compendia’s biomarker discovery strategies as part of a Workshop at BIO-Europe that he will moderate entitled, “From the Exception to the Rule: How Personalized Medicine Could Change Oncology Deals” on Monday, November 2 at 9:00 am.
Joining Freshley for the discussion will be Kinney Horn from Genentech, Tracey Colpitts with Abbott Molecular and Linda Pullan of Pullan Consulting.
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