For Immediate Release
DAIICHI SANKYO COMPANY, LIMITED
Celestar Lexico-Sciences, Inc.
Joint Research in Genome-based Target Discovery between Daiichi
Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and Celestar Lexico-Sciences, Inc. has concluded
Tokyo, December 5, 2005 ― The joint research in genome-based target
discovery between Daiichi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (President: Kiyoshi Morita),
a 100% subsidiary of DAIICHI SANKYO COMPANY, LIMITED, and Celestar
Lexico-Sciences, Inc. (hereafter CLS; President: Hirofumi Doi) has achieved its
objectives and reached its conclusion.
This collaboration aimed to obtain highly original drug targets through the
discovery of novel protein-protein interactions using CLS’s in silico prediction
technology. Daiichi Pharmaceutical successively conducted validation
experiments on CLS predictions, and discovered over 220 novel protein-protein
interactions for a wide range of disease-related proteins, including cancer,
vascular disease, diabetes and nerve degeneration. Among them, we have filed
patent applications for 44 novel protein-protein interactions of which relevance to
diseases has been elucidated. Daiichi Pharmaceutical will continue to examine
their relevance to diseases and successively file applications for new patents.
One of the findings, “Activation of Telomerase by mitogen-activated protein
kinase-activated protein kinase 3”, was presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of
the Japanese Cancer Association, and is anticipated as a promising drug target
in the treatment of cancer. Furthermore, both companies view the significance of
this joint research as follows:
(1) CLS’s protein-protein interaction prediction technology demonstrated high
performance in terms of speed and accuracy to obtain results.
(2) This research pioneered the methodologies in obtaining drug targets by
elucidating their functions from the in sillico information of protein-protein
interactions.
(3) By elucidating protein-protein interaction networks, the achievements of this
joint resear