Professor Stephen Miller from Northwestern University, a leading scientist in this field who supervised the studies, stated, "The capacity of CGEN-15001 to prevent the development of disease in this well-recognized animal model for multiple sclerosis, and more significantly to ameliorate its progression when administered in the presence of pre-existing disease is quite dramatic. Furthermore, these beneficial effects were shown to be long lasting and persisted through the study, indicating that CGEN-15001 may prevent disease progression as efficiently as immune tolerance induction, a process whereby the immune system no longer attacks the self antigens that cause the disease. These findings, together with those demonstrated in our earlier studies, are unique among the molecules targeting the B7 family of co-stimulatory molecules that have been published to date."

Compugen's VP R&D, Dr. Zurit Levine stated, "In addition to being an extremely exciting discovery, this is a good example of how our extensive infrastructure of predictive capabilities can be utilized for 'discovery on demand' purposes. In this case, we were interested in finding a new member of the B7 protein family, a family of proteins that are widely believed to have substantial therapeutic potential. However, it was our belief that relying only on commonly used discovery approaches, such as sequence and functional homology, which underlie most such efforts by others, would be unlikely to yield all unknown members for this family."

Dr. Levine continued, "We utilized, therefore, a different predictive discovery approach combining certain components of our LEADS infrastructure platform with a proprietary algorithm that had been developed to predict in silico novel members of a known protein family based on genomic information, protein structure and additional characteristics. This led to the prediction and selection of a number of novel proteins, including CGEN-15001T, and the discovery of CGEN-15001T led to the identification of the CGEN- 15001 protein."

SOURCE Compugen