BMS Picks Isis Antisense Candidate

Bristol-Myers Squibb has selected a compound from its collaboration with Isis Pharmaceuticals as a development candidate. As a result, Isis will receive a $2 million milestone payment. The two companies have an ongoing collaboration to identify antisense drugs that target proprotein convertase subtilisin kexin 9 (PCSK9). The development candidate is an antisense inhibitor of PCSK9 that helps regulate the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream.

The selection of this development candidate marks the achievement of the first milestone in this collaboration, which was announced in May, 2007. The compound was designed to selectively inhibit the production of PCSK9 and could offer a new and complementary mechanism to current lipid-lowering therapies for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

“In less than a year, we have been able to identify and characterize a number of antisense drugs that inhibit PCSK9 in preclinical studies and out of those, identified an attractive development candidate. With the selection by BMS of this development candidate, we have achieved our first milestone. The rapid progress we have made with our PCSK9 program is representative of the efficiency of our antisense technology to quickly move from target to drug,” said Brett Monia, Ph.D., Vice President of Antisense Drug Discovery of Isis. “PCSK9 is a new and exciting target for the management of lipids both to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, our antisense technology is uniquely suited to provide viable clinical drug candidates for PCSK9 and other targets that are not accessible using standard drug discovery approaches. This newest development candidate is the third clinical candidate to arise from our cardiovascular drug discovery program within the past four years, and we look forward to working with Bristol-Myers Squibb to advance this drug through development.”