Covance has purchased a minority equity stake in
Caprion Proteomics, a provider of proteomics-based services. Covance has also hired a new vice president to lead its Biomarker team and that it plans to establish a Biomarker Center of Excellence at its Greenfield, IN campus.
These moves are intended to enable Covance to capitalize on the emerging high-growth service market in biomarker discovery, verification, validation, and deployment across the drug development continuum, from preclinical to post-marketing surveillance.
Covance will serve as the exclusive CRO distributor of Caprion's proteomic biomarker services. In addition, Caprion will serve as Covance's exclusive proteomic discovery provider. Through this alliance, Covance and Caprion will offer pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug development customers a "distinctive, innovative, and integrated biomarker solution," according to a Covance statement.
"We are very pleased to be adding Caprion's solid scientific capabilities and leading biomarker technology platform to Covance's line up," said Deborah Tanner, corporate senior vice president and president of Covance Central Laboratory Services. "We expect that our clients will have a keen interest in this additional capability given Caprion's impressive track record of accelerating biomarker validation for early drug safety and efficacy assessment."
"We are excited to join forces with Covance's market-leading central laboratory and world-class scientific talent," said Martin LeBlanc, president and chief executive officer of Caprion. "Over the past five years, Caprion has established a large pharmaceutical customer base through employing our distinctive, best-in-class technology platform, which we expect will be further adopted in the market as a result of our alliance with Covance. Most importantly, we believe this alliance, which combines Covance's leading research services platform with Caprion's leading biomarker platform, will yield superior biomarker solutions for our clients."
Covance's Biomarker Center of Excellence will focus specifically on biomarker testing and validation and leverage the discovery support services of Caprion and of the services that already reside at Greenfield, including in vivo preclinical safety and efficacy assessment, and a variety of sophisticated preclinical imaging modalities.
The biomarker business will be led by
Thomas Turi, Ph.D., Covance's new vice president of Biomarkers. In his new role, Dr. Turi will be responsible for building the Center of Excellence for Biomarkers leading the Biomarker Expert Team.
Dr. Turi joins Covance with more than 14 years of experience leading drug discovery projects ranging from exploratory through early development programs. Prior to Covance, Dr. Turi spent his career at Pfizer, where he held a broad array of scientific leadership positions of increasing responsibility. Most recently, Dr. Turi served as the senior director of Translational Biomarkers and Mechanistic Biology at Pfizer's laboratories in Groton, CT.
GlaxoSmithKline and
Dynavax Technologies have entered a worldwide strategic alliance to discover, develop and commercialize novel inhibitors of endosomal Toll-like Receptors (TLRs) for the treatment of immuno-inflammatory diseases.
Dynavax will receive an initial payment of $10 million and GSK will receive an exclusive option over four programs targeting autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as lupus, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Dynavax’s lead inhibitor drug candidate, DV1079, is a bifunctional inhibitor of TLR7 and TLR9, and is expected to enter clinical development in the fourth quarter of 2009.
“Our alliance with GSK provides an opportunity to create an entirely new product franchise for Dynavax,” commented Dino Dina, M.D., president and chief executive officer of Dynavax. “Our TLR inhibitors have the potential to create significant value for our newest collaborator GSK as well as for our stockholders. Alliances with major pharmaceutical companies have enabled Dynavax to establish a diverse pipeline of innovative products, while contributing valuable cash for our programs.”
Dynavax will conduct research and early clinical development in as many as four programs and is eligible to receive future potential development and commercialization milestones totaling approximately $200 million per program. GSK can exercise its exclusive option to license each program upon achievement of proof-of-concept or earlier upon certain circumstances. After exercising its option, GSK will carry out further development and commercialization of these products. Dynavax will receive tiered royalties on sales and has retained an option to co-develop and co-promote one specified product.
PPD, Inc. plans to expand its global central lab services into Singapore in response to growing demand in Southeast Asia. The lab is expected to begin operations in mid-2009 and will provide biopharmaceutical clients with a "comprehensive range of highly customized lab services," according to a PPD statement.
"Southeast Asia is an attractive region for conducting clinical trials, and Singapore is an important biopharmaceutical hub," said Agostino L. Fede, Ph.D., senior vice president of PPD and head of PPD's global central labs. "Establishing a direct lab presence in Singapore will enhance our abilities to reduce turnaround time and deliver high quality specimens and laboratory results at better logistics costs for our clients."
PPD has provided a range of clinical development services in Singapore for several years, including clinical trial management and monitoring, patient recruitment, site identification and regulatory affairs. The equipment in Singapore is identical to platforms located at PPD's global central labs in Brussels, Belgium;, Highland Heights, KY, and Beijing, China. Assays will be extensively cross validated among PPD's locations to produce combinable data, according to the company.
PPD's Singapore lab will interface directly with ConneXion, the company's proprietary global computer system, to ensure consistent management and real-time reporting.
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