Our Mission
Horizon Discovery’s mission is to provide researchers with gold-standard research tools to support the development of personalized medicines.
Patient-relevant in-vitro disease models have been a missing link in the discovery of novel treatments that are ‘targeted’ or ‘personalized’ to the unique genetic mutations that define a patient’s disease type, progression; and consequently their inherent or acquired drug sensitivity and resistance profiles.
The growing need for genetically-defined models in the field of cancer has been driven by Professor Bardelli’s studies, published in the Journal of Cancer Research (March 2007) and the Journal of Clinical Oncology (October 2008). These studies retrospectively analyzed tissue samples from the clinical trials performed for the novel ‘EGFR’ targeting colorectal cancer drugs; Erbitux and Vectibix and found that the majority of patients that carry a secondary mutant gene (KRAS and BRAF) are resistant to these drugs (in a combined total of 52% of patients trialed). These data were subsequently confirmed in prospective trials performed by the pharmaceutical companies developing these drugs; and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) has now mandated the compulsory testing of all colon cancer patients for these resistance genes before any EGFR-targeted drugs can be prescribed. The American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) subsequently petitioned for these guidelines to be adopted in the U.S and in December 2009 the Food and Drug Administration implemented a similar mandate.
Horizon’s X-MAN™ cell models are the world’s first source of genetically-defined and patient-relevant human cell lines. The broad panel of over 350 genotypes across 20 parental backgrounds provide a means of testing putative cancer drugs against, what are in effect, ‘patients in a test-tube’. These tools represent a key missing link in the personalized drug discovery puzzle and have been deployed by most of the worlds leading pharmaceutical companies in the development of rational next-generation medicines.
