PharmaTelevision - Compugen’s Powers of Prediction

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Video title: Compugen’s Powers of Prediction

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Do we really have a good understanding of how life works at a molecular level? Martin Gerstel, Chairman of Compugen, explains how the company has created a computer that can accurately model the behaviour of molecules, information that can then be used to predict drug targets.

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Compugen origin and development.

Fintan Walton:

Hello and welcome to PharmaVentures business review here in San Francisco. On this show I have Martin Gerstel who is CEO of Compugen which is based in Israel. Welcome to the show.

Martin Gerstel:

Thank you very much, pleasure to be here.

Fintan Walton:

MartinGerstel,Compugen is a company that has its origins around computers, it's a computer based company. Tell us about the origin of that company and how it's developed into the Compugen as we know today?

Martin Gerstel:

I was introduced to the company about four years after it had been founded since though it was did something consulting for a venture firm, the company had created a special purpose computer a computer that could be one thing and one thing only and that is to analyze all of the biological data that was been created around the world this was the early 90's to analyze all of that data to try to make sense out of this in term of the human genome project and everybody is buying the sequencers and unbelievable amounts of raw data was being created but these were tiny little pieces of data the issue of how to put them together and make sense out of them and there were three kids from a very special research program in the Israeli Army called the Talpiot program that heard about this problem got some money from the government, $50,000 and in nine months created a computer that was a 1000 times faster than any in the world to do this project that it completed mispriced it. But they rapidly became the world leader with 90% of the market I believe to this day that we've patent that's filed in the United States with biological data's analyzed by a Compugen computer. They are very doing this they work with everyone with all of the leading centre's that were doing " doing this type of work and they rapidly discover that what they had done was they created a situation where it was raw data in garbage out of thousand times faster because the algorithms that were used to analyze this data just were very crewed, they were done by some Ph.D. student in the university and life science was changing everyday and understanding of it. So they decided that what they would do is hire some biologists and being with some of the best algorithm people in the world. Israel of course is known for that it's military unmanned, air surveillance aircraft and whatever. They were experts in this so they began to develop new algorithms to analysis the data and what they found out in doing this with the idea of creating computers they found out that the world would just -- was wrong in their understanding of how life worked at molecular level just absolutely wrong.

Fintan Walton:

So it was using algorithms to understand data?

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Martin Gerstel

Chairman

Martin Gerstel Pissarrahas been chairman ofCompugen since 1997. In addition, he serves as chairman of two Compugen affiliated companies, Evogene Ltd and Keddem Bioscience and is a co-founder and co-chairman of Itamar Medical (an Israeli based medical device company). Prior to relocating to Israel in 1994, Mr. Gerstel was co-chairman and CEO of ALZA Corporation, which he helped found in 1968. He currently serves as a director of Yissum Ltd, Yeda Ltd and the US Foundation for the National Medals of Science and Technology.MrGerstel is a member of the Board of Governors and Executive Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University. He is also an advisor to the Burrill Life Sciences Fund and the board of the Israel-U.S. Bi-national Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation. Mr.Gerstel holds a B.S. from Yale Universityand an MBA from Stanford University.

Compugen

Compugen's mission is to be the world leader in the discovery and licensing of product candidates to the drug and diagnostic industries under milestone and revenue sharing agreements. The Company's increasing inventory of powerful and proprietary discovery platforms is enabling the predictive discovery " field after field " of numerous therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates. These discovery platforms are based on the Company's decade-long focus on the predictive understanding of important biological phenomena at the molecular level. Compugen's current collaborations include Biosite, Medarex, Inc.,,Merck & Co., Inc.,, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics a Johnson & Johnson company,Roche,Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Inc., and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.In 2002,Compugen established an affiliate Evogene Ltd . (TASE: EVGN.TA) to utilize the Company's in silico predictive discovery capabilities in the agricultural biotechnology field. Compugen has been publicly traded on Nasdaq (NASDAQ: CGEN) since August 2000 and on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange since January 2002.