VITA™ Technology Presented at ICAAC
Cambridge, MA, September 24, 1998 -- Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: CBST) announced today that it will be presenting data on its proprietary VITA™ (Validation In Vivo of Targets and Assays for Antiinfectives) drug discovery technology at the 38th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in San Diego on Sunday, September 27. The VITA technology couples the validation of drug targets during an established infection in a mouse model system with assay development and screening for the discovery of novel drug leads. The data to be presented demonstrates the validation of a target for antiinfective drug discovery by the regulated inhibition of the target in a pathogen during a systemic infection.
In collaboration with Novalon Pharmaceutical Corporation, Cubist will also be presenting data on the identification of potent inhibitor molecules discovered in a new high throughput screening competitive binding assay that overcomes obstacles inherent in the screening of novel targets.
"The genomics explosion is doing an excellent job of solving the problem of
identifying potential protein targets, but it has created a new technical
challenge of how to harvest this wealth of information for drug discovery," said
Scott M. Rocklage, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Cubist. "We
recognized early on that innovative technologies would be needed to overcome the
rate-limiting steps between protein identification, target validation and the
discovery of new drug leads. We believe our data demonstrate the ability of our
VITA platform technology to triage candidate drug targets and enable an
assessment of a greater number and diversity of targets while providing valuable
information on potential efficacy within the context of an actual infection.
VITA seamlessly integrates the power of genomi
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Contact: Neil Cohen
neil@noonanrusso.com
(415) 439-4898
Noonan/Russo Communications
24-Sep-1998