CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Looking to identify mechanistic synergies between drug families, Gene Network Sciences (GNS) announced a research agreement with CombinatoRx. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the deal will see GNS apply its reverse engineering and forward simulation (REFS) platform to CombinatoRx's gene and protein expression data to discover novel combination therapies.

 

With a steadily growing list of multifactorial diseases and conditions, pharmaceutical companies are likely to find that the most efficacious therapies will be those that combine drugs hitting different targets. Such drug cocktails have become common practice in HIV treatment and will find increased use in treatments for conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. In a February 2007 report on cancer therapies, Kalorama Information analyst Melissa Elder suggested, "The prospect of combining new agents with older forms of therapy, such as small molecule chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, also offers promise for improvement in disease outcomes."

 

This is just the latest such deal that GNS has announced in 2007. In June, the company announced it would work with researchers at Weill Cornell Medical Center and with M2Gen, a for-profit subsidiary of the Moffitt Cancer Center to identify synergistic activities between cancer drugs.