Horizon Discovery Signs Large-Scale License Agreement

Horizon Discovery recently announced it has entered into a large-scale licensing agreement with a Japanese medical university. The agreement covers a limited use label license for academic use of 250 of Horizon’s X-MAN genetically defined, isogenic cell lines, and demonstrates the global recognition of the company’s in vitro disease models.

Horizon’s X-MAN isogenic cell lines accurately model the disease-causing mutations found in patients with cancer, and increasingly other diseases. Horizon creates these cell lines using its precision genome-editing GENESIS platform, consisting of rAAV, ZFN, and CRISPR technologies, to engineer specific disease-related mutations. These models help researchers understand how complex genetic diseases manifest themselves in patients, and can reduce the cost of bringing to market new personalized therapies by streamlining many aspects of drug development, including target identification, target validation, assay development, drug screening, lead optimization, and biomarker-driven clinical trial design.

“This is a very significant deal for Horizon Discovery, covering a large number of cell lines and representing a large investment by the university,” said Kam Dhaliwal, VP Sales, Horizon Discovery. “We are delighted that our distribution partnership in Japan with Summit Pharmaceuticals International (SPI) is proving so productive. Summit has proven to be extremely effective in opening the Japanese market for Horizon, and we anticipate further adoption of our products and services in Japan in the future.”

The director of the Translational Research Centre at the university added, “Horizon’s X-MAN cell lines offer a unique and valuable resource for the study of specific, disease-related mutations. We are looking forward to applying the X-MAN technology in our research projects.”

Horizon Discovery Limited is a leading provider of research tools to support translational genomics research and the development of personalized medicines. Using GENESIS, Horizon is able to alter almost any endogenous gene sequence of a human or mammalian cell-line quickly, reliably, and without introducing unwanted and confounding genotypes and/or phenotypes.

Horizon has applied GENESIS to create over 500 X-MAN cell lines, the world’s first source of genetically defined and patient-relevant human cell lines, accurately modeling the disease-causing mutations found in cancer patients. These “patients-in-a-test-tube” are being used by academic and industry leaders to identify the effect of individual or compound genetic mutations on drug activity, patient responsiveness, and resistance, which may lead to the successful prediction of which patient sub-groups will respond to currently available and future drug treatments. This enables the design of shorter, more focused, and less-expensive clinical trials, ultimately providing the tools to identify the right drugs for the right patients based upon the unique genetic mutations that define their disease.

In addition to the X-MAN cell lines, Horizon provides GENESIS- and X-MAN-derived products and services, with industrial application in biopharmaceutical process optimization; clinical diagnostic development; drug discovery and development; and the provision of reference standards for genomic-based clinical research platforms. For more information, visit www.horizondiscovery.com.