AVEO Pharmaceuticals and Lilly Sign Collaboration for Clinical Drug Response Project

Cambridge, MA - AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company leveraging breakthrough discoveries in cancer biology to discover, develop and commercialize targeted oncology therapies, recently announced that it has signed a collaborative agreement with Eli Lilly and Company. Under the agreement, the parties will use AVEO's Human Response Platform as part of a pilot project to identify patient populations likely to be responsive to an investigational cancer compound currently being developed by Lilly. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The collaboration is focused on identifying genetic profiles that correlate with drug response to more effectively guide the clinical development of one of Lilly's cancer compounds. AVEO's expertise in cancer biology enables the company to pursue highly efficient clinical development strategies in oncology and provides a discovery engine for high-value targets. This approach has resulted in various partnerships, as well as a robust pipeline of proprietary cancer therapies focused on well-validated targets (VEGFR, EGFR), as well as promising novel targets (HGF).

"We are very pleased to collaborate with Lilly to further demonstrate the utility of our Human Response Platform," stated Tuan Ha-Ngoc, president and chief executive officer of AVEO. "This latest collaboration with a global pharmaceutical company indicates the opportunity that our unique platform provides our select partners and AVEO to increase the efficiency and probability of success of drug development in oncology. Ultimately we believe this will enable us to bring the right drugs to the right patients."

Ha-Ngoc added, "Agreements with selected partners to access our novel Human Response Platform augment our overarching business strategy. Through a combination of internal drug discovery and selective in-licensing of targeted therapeutics, AVEO is building a diversified product pipeline and moving toward its vision of becoming a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company."

SOURCE: AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc