Roche deal with Kinaxo highlights growing importance of biomarkers

Collaboration

Kinaxo has announced a collaboration with Roche Diagnostics under which its phosphoproteomics technology PhosphoScout will be applied to support the identification of biomarkers that can be applied to the clinical development and use of therapeutic antibodies currently under development at Roche. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

This deal comes on top of an agreement last week in which Kinaxo agreed to apply the technology to find biomarkers for Bayer in the clinical development of the cancer drug Nexavar, a multi-kinase inhibitor, in treating leukaemia. In this deal, Kinaxo, a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, will apply PhosphoScout  to elucidate the drug’s influence on cellular phosphorylation patterns and uncover novel predictive biomarkers.

PhosphoScout is a method for analysing cellular signal transduction pathways and their response to drug treatment. The technology is based on proprietary mass spectrometry methods, which enable the unbiased analysis of 15,000 phosphorylation sites in a single experiment.

Klaus Godl, Kinaxo’s CSO, said, “Cellular signal transmission in eukaryotic cells is mainly regulated by the reversible phosphorylation of proteins. Therefore, differential analysis of the complete cellular phosphoproteome upon drug treatment provides highly informative insights into the modes of action of targeted cancer drugs.”