Horizon Discovery and AstraZeneca Win “Licensing Deal of the Year” at Scrip Awards 2013 for Kinase Target Program

Horizon Discovery (Horizon) has won “Licensing Deal of the Year” at the Scrip Awards 2013, for their agreement with AstraZeneca to explore Horizon’s first-in-class kinase target program HD-001 as a means of developing novel therapies for multiple cancer types. The Scrip Awards are highly prestigious, recognizing excellence in both pharma and biotech companies and those firms that support them.

The HD-001 program has the potential to be developed into a treatment based on modulation of a novel kinase. This target has been shown to be mutated in a range of cancer types including colon and lung. Importantly, the target has also been shown to play a key role in K-Ras mutant tumors. K-Ras is mutated in up to 40% of all cancer types causing resistance to many of the available targeted therapeutics and as a result is associated with poor patient outcomes, which makes the development of molecular targeted therapies against the gene a significant unmet need. A case study on the development of the HD-001 program can be found here: www.horizondiscovery.com/media/item/67

Dr. Chris Torrance, CSO and leader of the HD-001 program at Horizon, commented: “We were excited to partner this program with AstraZeneca, and we have made good progress since the start of the collaboration. We are delighted that the quality of the program has now also been recognized by Scrip, and are honored to accept the award.”