Abbott announces new “exciting” drug discovery partnership

Abbott has announced it has entered into a new collaboration with Dharmacon to research and develop new drugs for diseases where traditional drug discovery techniques have been unsuccessful.

With the help of Dharmacon’s gene silencing technologies that employ RNA interference (RNAi) methods, Abbott intends to focus on multiple areas of treatment, with an initial emphasis on cancer.

RNAi is a method of silencing gene expression in cells. It is a relatively new method of drug discovery but Abbott said it has “exciting therapeutic potential” because it can target disease-related genes for which small molecule drugs do not exist by using short-interfering RNAs (siRNA).

Stephen Fesik, Abbott’s divisional vice-president of cancer research, stated: “Joining forces with RNAi pioneer Dharmacon to develop drug candidates that harness the clinical potential of this revolutionary technology is very exciting.

“The collaboration fits our strategy to extend Abbott’s portfolio with novel therapies in areas of high unmet need.”

“By combining our drug discovery and development expertise with Dharmacon’ s continuing advances in understanding the fundamentals of siRNA-based gene silencing, we will be able to explore targets that everyone knows exist, but have not been able to successfully create drugs to address,” he added.

Dharmacon is a subsidiary of Fisher Scientific International, which includes other companies such as Pierce, Endogen, Oxoid and HyClone.

In April 2005, Dharmacon agreed to share its siRNA libraries with Cancer Research UK. Dr Julian Downward, principal scientist of the signal transduction laboratory at Cancer Research UK, said: “We believe that RNAi functional genomic studies have great potential in helping us achieve our vision of using world-class research to conquer cancer in two generations.”

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