By Karen Pihl-Carey

Staff Writer

Investors leapt at news Thursday that Myriad Genetics Inc. identified a new HIV drug target that could lead to a new class of therapeutics, distinct from those already on the market or known to be in development.

The Salt Lake City company's stock (NASDAQ:MYGN) rose 23 percent Thursday to close at $27, up $5.

The company would not reveal the exact identity of the target for competitive reasons.

"I think this is a very exciting target," said Adrian Hobden, president of Myriad Pharmaceuticals Inc., the Myriad subsidiary that will attempt to identify a lead compound. "We translated a target into a high-throughput drug discovery screen. We're very confident of our ability to run the screen. We don't have the breakthrough in HIV yet in terms of the drug. But we are confident that this is an attractive approach for getting novel therapies. We are hopeful and optimistic that this will lead to novel compounds in the treatment of AIDS."

The drug target will enable the creation of therapeutics that are completely distinct from the protease inhibitors or reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which represent HIV drugs already on the market. Hobden said Myriad researchers wanted to find a new target since there already are effective drugs in existing classes.

The drugs, however, have not stopped the infection from spreading, he said. Multi-drug resistant strains of the virus require new therapies that act through different mechanisms. "What we've recognized is that HIV has not gone away," Hobden told BioWorld Today. "The fact of the matter is the individuals are still infected with HIV, and in order to maintain those patients as symptom-free, there will be a need for a larger range of drugs to tackle the disease."

To identify a protein to inhibit, Myriad researchers explored the relationship between essential viral proteins and the host proteins to try to understand why the virus was replicating, Hobden said. The company's ProNet technology, which discovers protein interactions and identifies key regulators of disease pathways, assisted the researchers in finding the undisclosed target.

"We don't want to give away a competitive advantage of what we believe we have," Hobden said. "Obviously, as we proceed down the pathway and take this into drug discovery and, hopefully, find lead compounds, we will reveal the target by filing patent applications."

The company created assays for drugs that modify the target in preparation for high-throughput screening. It has not licensed the target to another company.

"Our declared strategy is to take these novel targets into our proprietary screening systems and do our own lead molecule discovery and do standard chemistry programs and preclinical development," Hobden said. "It's not our intention at this stage to take any products into the clinic ourselves. We prefer to partner with pharmaceutical companies."

Myriad will look to partner specifically with pharmaceutical companies that have franchises in HIV, Hobden said.

The HIV drug target represents Myriad's seventh internal drug development program. The company has programs in the areas of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, chronic pain, sleep disorders and cognition. Myriad said in September it identified six new drug targets from within these programs.

The company raised $10 million last month through an expansion of its year-old ProNet collaboration with Schering AG, of Berlin. The agreement expanded the collaboration to include the identification of treatments for heart disease, as well as for finding cancer therapeutics. (See BioWorld Today, Oct. 27, 1999, p. 1.)

Myriad also partnered with Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute in September in a $33.5 million deal to research cereal crop genomics. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 10, 1999, p. 1.)