Gilead Sciences announced an agreement with Compugen, a clinical-stage cancer immunotherapy and computational target discovery company, to exclusively license its potential first-in-class, pre-clinical antibody program against IL-18 binding protein, including the COM503 drug candidate.

“We are very pleased to add COM503 to our pipeline of investigational immuno-oncology therapies that have the potential to transform care for patients with cancer,” said Flavius Martin, Executive Vice President, Research, Gilead Sciences.

“We are delighted to enter into this collaboration with Gilead and believe that Gilead’s confidence in our differentiated approach to harness cytokine biology for cancer therapeutics speaks to the quality of our computational discovery capabilities as well as our ability to translate our novel discoveries into investigational drugs in the clinic and we look forward to working together to bring new treatment options to patients,” commented Anat Cohen-Dayag, President, and CEO at Compugen.

Under the terms of the agreement, Compugen will be responsible for the ongoing pre-clinical development and the future Phase 1 study of COM503. Thereafter, Gilead will have the sole right to develop and commercialize COM503.