Nov 13 2008
Telik, Inc. (NASDAQ:TELK) announced today an agreement to provide its TRAP(R) drug discovery technology to investigators at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS). The Research Division of HSS studies the mechanisms underlying musculoskeletal and autoimmune diseases to discover effective treatments for these disorders. HSS investigators will use Telik's TRAP technology to discover novel compounds that inhibit a key enzyme in cell signaling and migration.
"By efficiently identifying novel small molecules that affect biological targets, Telik's TRAP technology offers a unique opportunity to accelerate our research," said Carl Blobel, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, Physiology, and Biophysics, and Director of the Arthritis and Tissue Degeneration Program at HSS. "We are interested in membrane bound enzymes and the biological effects that result from their modulation. Rapidly finding small molecules that inhibit these enzymes could lead to new ways to treat diseases for which there is significant unmet medical need."
"This partnership allows the world-class investigators at HSS to leverage our recent advances in TRAP technology to accelerate the discovery of new therapeutics that target complex and novel biological targets," said Robert Lum, Ph.D., Telik's Vice President of Technology and Preclinical Development.
TRAP technology exploits the principle that drugs act by adhering to and interacting with cellular proteins. Telik has developed a novel computational approach to determine a molecular fingerprint for each of the over three million compounds in its library. TRAP technology uses these molecular fingerprints to rapidly search the library for promising lead molecules and to optimize these structures into new drug candidates.