Case Western Reserve University has licensed a panel of cell lines to a British company that will use them for cancer research.
The cell lines are based on technology pioneered by Zhenghe John Wang, an assistant professor of genetics at Case’s school of medicine.
Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Horizon Discovery Ltd. has licensed the technology for 10 years in a deal that includes up-front fees and an ongoing royalty on product sales, according to a statement from Case.
“These cell lines provide unique tools for drug discovery, because they are cells that best represent human cancers,” Wang said in the statement. “Further research based on these cells may lead to development of new cancer therapies.”
Horizon will add the cell lines from Case to its library of so-called X-MAN (Gene-X; Mutant and Normal) cell models. The models are used predict which patient groups will respond to certain drug treatments, according to the statement.
Horizon was founded in 2007, and has received financial backing from Genentech and Roche.
The company operates in the field of personalized medicine, which refers to the idea of tailoring medicine to patients’ individual genetic risks, diet and other factors. Personalized medicine is a disruptive innovation that will require new business models, according to global business consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) in its The New Science of Personalized Medicine report. PWC projects the worldwide pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics segment of the market to be worth $24 billion and growing at 10 percent a year.
