Horizon Discovery and AstraZeneca Win 'Licensing Deal of the Year'

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 programme HD-001 as a means of developing novel therapies for multiple cancer types. The Scrip Awards are highly prestigious, recognising excellence in both pharma and biotech companies and those firms that support them.

The HD-001 programme 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 tumours. 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 programme can be found here.

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