Novel, Leading-Edge Drug-Screening Technique Basis of Start-up Company Founded by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Business Wire, August 20, 1998

BOSTON--(BW HealthWire)--Aug. 20, 1998--A novel drug-screening technology is the basis of a new biotechnology start-up company at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, officials of the organization announced today.

The new technique creates a vast "chemical" library of billions of potential drugs which scientists can screen in record time to find the perfect match between a compound and specific protein, cell, or gene target that turns a disease off or on. The new commercial endeavor, Consensus Pharmaceuticals Inc., is one of many such innovative research developments that the Office of Science and Technology at Beth Israel Deaconess is pursuing, with the intent of bringing to market leading-edge technologies with enormous therapeutic and commercial potential.

"This new technology from Consensus has the potential of yielding a number of specific drugs that address diseases resistant to therapeutic approaches in the past," says Mark Chalek, director of corporate research at the Office of Science and Technology at BI-Deaconess. Many compounds work by attaching themselves or binding to the surface of certain cells or proteins, inhibiting the interactions that result in abnormal cell growth and disease. "One of the most exciting and powerful uses of this drug-screening technique is for the development of protease inhibitors, analogous to the types of drugs that can block HIV infection."

"The beauty of our approach is that you can easily screen tens of billions or even trillions of chemical structures in a very short period of time, looking for the best possible drug," says Lewis Cantley, PhD, a Professor of Medicine at BI-Deaconess who pioneered the inventive drug-screening technique.

Other drug-screening technologies on the market rely on high through-put screening and can handle hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of drugs, but not billions, according to Dr. Cantley, an international leader in the field of molecular and cell biology and signal transduction pathways. "Although many companies and many laboratories use library screening approaches what is unique about ours is that we do not isolate molecules one at a time but rather collect a large group of molecules that bind to the target and deduce what they have in common. The advantage of this technology is that much larger libraries can be screened in much shorter times."

The spin-off company, a venture initiated by Cantley, a number of his colleagues, and the Office of Science and Technology, represents the first time Beth Israel Deaconess has taken an equity position in a technology-transfer company started by medical center investigators. The medical center will hold stock in the company and the company will pay the medical center for patent rights. Investors include Interwest Partners of Menlo Park, CA, and Axiom Ventures of Hartford, CT.

Directed by Dr. Barry Eisenstein, the Office of Science and Technology, formed shortly after the merger of Beth Israel and Deaconess Hospitals to form BI-Deaconess, demonstrates the commitment of the medical center to one of its central missions: the support of groundbreaking clinical and biomedical research. In 1997, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center received $55 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, making it the third largest recipient in the country of NIH grants to independent hospitals. BIDMC's overall sponsored research budget is $100 million. Chalek estimates that there are more than 400 research teams at work throughout the medical center, each with the potential to produce innovative research.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a major clinical, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical Center.

CONTACT: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Shaila Afzal, Patti Jacobs, 617/667-4431