West Coast Editor

Iconix Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s chemogenomics platform bagged another big-name pharma deal, this time signing up Eli Lilly and Co. to a research and license agreement described as "similar in scope" to last year's pacts with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Abbott Laboratories Inc.

From last year's deal with New York-based BMS, Iconix said at the time that it stood to gain as much as $24 million, excluding commercialization fees and royalties. Terms of the deal with Abbott, of Abbott Park, Ill., were not disclosed. (See BioWorld Today, Jan. 22, 2004.)

"Lilly is very disciplined, in terms of their process" of deciding to make a deal, said Jim Neal, CEO of Mountain View, Calif.-based Iconix. "They did a very thorough assessment of our technology and its ability to fit with their programs," he added, and the deal was completed in "multi-step fashion" as Lilly became more familiar with Iconix.

Like BMS and Abbott, Indianapolis-based Lilly is paying for access to Iconix's DrugMatrix chemogenomics system, a database of genomic effects of drugs and chemicals, and its Drug Signatures library, which includes more than 300 sets of predictive biomarker genes known as "drug signatures."

Lilly will use the technology to help prioritize and choose candidate drug molecules and to improve the understanding of the safety and mechanistic profiles of new compounds, from the preclinical (and earlier) to clinical stages.

Iconix's technology is especially useful in toxicology studies, Neal said.

"No longer is it this black hole," he noted. "[The molecule] goes to toxicology, and you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down." A toxicology report might find that an otherwise promising molecule causes "bumps and bruises in the rats, but it doesn't give much indication what I can do about that."

Drug developers know bruises on rats later can mean bad stats, and Iconix's methods - by providing "a much deeper assessment" of what's going on with the molecule - allow for a "nice dialogue that starts to occur between the program people and the tox people," who might previously have found themselves at somewhat separate poles, Neal said.

"At the end of the day, what we've studied tend to be more cancer therapeutics," he told BioWorld Today. "We're trying to say a certain pattern of gene expression is indicative of toxicology," so potential cancer drugs - because they generally are more toxic - "help us calibrate some of the cleaner drugs to be used in chronic settings."

Separately, Iconix said the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has renewed its agreement for access to DrugMatrix, originally signed in 2003. In the renewal, Iconix is working with the FDA's new cross-center Interdisciplinary Pharmacogenomic Review Group, established in March as part of the agency's move toward incorporating chemogenomic data into the drug approvals process.

The IPRG reviews Voluntary Genomic Data Submissions (VGDSs) and advises the FDA on interpreting and evaluating information. VGDSs are made up of data submitted to the agency but not required under the regulations.

"It's an ongoing piece of our collaborator environment," Neal said of the FDA arrangement. Having the agency's blessing provides a bridge to more deals with companies and is "very important in getting [them] comfortable with the technology," he said. Iconix now has "more than 20" deals, Neal said.