Ambit Biosciences is First to Offer More Than Half the Human Kinome in its Kinase Profiling Panel
Robust Technology Enables Rapid Identification and Optimization of Drug Candidates from Compound Libraries
SAN DIEGO – April 3, 2007 – Ambit Biosciences today announced that the company has expanded the panel of kinases available through its KinomeScan profiling technology to 317 from 256. The newly added assays include several therapeutically relevant wild-type and mutant kinases, including phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K), a lipid kinase target for oncology. The expanded KinomeScan panel now represents the largest and most comprehensive profiling panel of its kind.
"Ambit's pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners are making KinomeScan a key part of their discovery efforts because it helps them select higher quality drug candidates and make better decisions about which targets to pursue and which hits and leads to advance," said Scott Salka, Chief Executive Officer of Ambit. "Our significant advantage in panel size, screening throughput, data quality, turnaround and cost efficiency will allow us to continue delivering a product that helps our partners bring better drugs to the clinic in the shortest time possible."
KinomeScan is a novel approach for the evaluation and annotation of compound libraries. Using proprietary technology and automation processes, KinomeScan can rapidly test large or small libraries to provide valuable information about the binding of compounds to both intended and unintended kinase targets. The complete kinase profiles generated by KinomeScan can significantly increase the value of compound libraries by revealing new scaffolds, lead compounds for optimization, and off-target interactions that potentially impact safety and clinical utility. Additionally, Ambit has developed novel visualization and analysis tools to make the best use of data generated by KinomeScan.
At its current scale, KinomeScan is capable of screening hundreds of compounds per day against the entire kinase panel. During the three months ended February 2007, Ambit screened nearly 7,000 compounds with KinomeScan.
About KinomeScan
KinomeScan is a platform that employs proprietary ATP-site dependent competition binding assays. Client libraries remain confidential, and chemical structures are not required to utilize KinomeScan. This simple, highly efficient approach ensures that discovery programs stay on an optimal development course, provides unprecedented insight into how molecules or entire libraries bind to both intended and unintended kinases, and opportunistically identifies unanticipated interactions that can expand the therapeutic utility of compounds or serve as advanced starting points for new programs.
Ambit's KinomeScan platform is a key component of the company’s partnerships with Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline Cephalon, and others. It has been featured in papers published in Nature Biotechnology, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Cancer Research.
About Ambit Biosciences
Ambit Biosciences is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of small molecule kinase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer. Ambit is conducting a Phase I clinical trial in acute myeloid leukemia with AC220, a selective class III receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor. AC220 was discovered using Ambit's proprietary kinase profiling technology, KinomeScan, which is designed to be integrated across all stages of the drug discovery and development process and has been validated through collaborations with Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Cephalon and others. Ambit has a strong syndicate of investors including Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical Fund, Forward Ventures, Roche Venture Fund, Avalon Ventures, GIMV NV, MDS Capital, Genechem and Bristol-Myers Squibb.