BOTHELL, WA, and VANCOUVER - OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals Inc., announced in a press release that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued US Patent Number 7,569,551 entitled "Chemo-and Radiation-sensitization of Cancer by Antisense TRPM-2 Oligodeoxynucleotides," on the method of using OncoGenex' lead cancer drug candidate, OGX-011, to treat certain cancers.
The patent, licensed from the University of British Columbia, includes coverage for the method for treating cancers that express the protein clusterin using OGX-011, or any other clusterin antisense oligonucleotide, in combination with any chemotherapeutic agent or radiation therapy.
"The issuance of this patent expands our Intellectual Property estate for treating clusterin-expressing cancers using antisense therapy and provides us with a broad patent that applies well beyond prostate cancer," OncoGenex President and CEO Scott Cormack said.
"Importantly, given that our current Phase 3 plans include combining OGX-011 with chemotherapy, this patent directly relates to our current method of using OGX-011," he added.
OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals Inc. owns or has licenses to approximately 67 granted or issued US and foreign patents, and approximately 140 pending US and foreign patent applications worldwide.
Composition of matter patents covering OGX-011, OGX-427, SN2310, CSP-9222 and TOCOSOL have issued in the US and certain other jurisdictions.
Additional patent applications covering all of these products, as well as other technologies, are pending in the US and certain other countries. TRPM-2 is an historical name for clusterin, and survives in some of the earlier patent filings.
OncoGenex is a biopharmaceutical company committed to the development and commercialization of new therapies that address unmet needs in the treatment of cancer.
