Roche expands agreement with Trega Biosciences

Under the terms of the agreement, Roche expands to a three-year global license from their initial license to the absorption module granted earlier this year. The

By Editor on Jan 18, 2001

Under the
terms of the agreement, Roche expands to a three-year global license from
their initial license to the absorption module granted earlier this year. The
new license agreement also includes access to the iDEA metabolism module,
as well as product updates for the life of the license. Financial terms were
not disclosed.

"The success of our initial relationship with Trega, and our joint work to
confirm the ability of the absorption module to predict the extent of
absorption in humans of various compounds led us to expand and lengthen our
agreement," said Nigel Rogers, a representative of the global Roche
Multi-dimensional Optimization initiative. "The absorption module will be
used in our lead optimization programs as part of a decision process to
evaluate candidates as we move through the discovery process. We look forward
to also evaluating the new metabolism module."

"This agreement illustrates a growing acceptance of Trega's methods for in
silico drug discovery and development," said Mark W. Schwartz,
Vice President of Commercial Operations and CCO of
Trega. "As pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies strive to shorten the drug development timeline, reliance on
non-scalable, less predictive and expensive animal modeling can be augmented
by faster, more predictive computational methods."

The iDEA Predictive ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism,
excretion) Simulation System for drug absorption is a validated
and highly predictive in silico solution developed in conjunction with five
prominent pharmaceutical companies. The absorption module was constructed to
simulate the physiological process of drug absorption, and incorporates human
physiological parameters.

The model is trained with a proprietary database of
in vitro and human in vivo pharmacokinetic data for selected drugs and drug
candidates, including many that failed in the development process. This
training set of compounds is unique in that it represents a very diverse set
of drug properties. Trega plans to complete a metabolism model at the
beginning of this year and subsequently develop additional models that will
enable the complete prediction of bioavailability.

As recently announced, Trega Biosciences has signed an agreement
with LION bioscience, in which LION will acquire 100% of the equity of
Trega in exchange for LION American Depositary Shares. LION and Trega will
combine complementary technologies and products. This transaction is
expected to close in March or April of 2001.