Cardinal Health to Collaborate with Wyeth on Cell Line Development

Patented GPEx^® Technology will be used to Engineer Cell Lines

Expressing Wyeth Biopharmaceutical Molecules

 

DUBLIN, Ohio, Sept. 21, 2006 – Cardinal Health, the leading provider of products and services supporting the health-care industry, today announced it has entered a feasibility agreement with Wyeth (NYSE: WYE), acting through its Wyeth Pharmaceuticals division, to develop cell lines using Cardinal Health’s Gene Product Expression (GPEx^®) cell line engineering technology. 

 

Cardinal Health will use its patented GPEx^® technology to engineer cell lines that express two undisclosed biopharmaceutical molecules in experiments that will determine if the GPEx^® approach is a feasible augmentation to Wyeth’s current production methods. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

 

“Wyeth has taken a leadership position among major pharmaceutical companies to seriously move into large molecule therapeutics and has a great track record with biopharmaceutical R&D, manufacturing and commercialization,” said Paul Weiss, PhD, president of Cardinal Health’s biopharmaceutical development services center. “We feel confident that the speed and high expression capabilities of our GPEx^® technology will be attractive to Wyeth as they evaluate additional platforms to rapidly and cost-effectively produce biopharmaceuticals.”

 

In addition to enabling rapid cell line development and availability of candidate gene products, the GPEx^® technology is well suited for both efficient pilot and large-scale production of antibodies and other therapeutic recombinant proteins.

 

About GPEx^® Technology

A study published in Nature Biotechnology last year estimates that there are approximately 500 biopharmaceuticals currently in clinical development.  With existing technology, it can take as long as 18 months to develop the transgenic cell lines needed to produce these complex molecules.  The creation of these cell lines is a crucial step required before sufficient quantities of the protein or antibody can be produced to perform clinical trials.  GPEx^® can generate stable cell lines that exhibit significantly higher levels of expression than those cell lines generated by standard methods and can achieve this in as little as six months.

 

The GPEx^® retrovector system can insert single copies of specific genes into multiple locations in DNA of cells.  GPEx^® mimics natural gene transfer phenomena, resulting in greater transgene stability, and more consistent protein expression.

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