The relentless push towards personalised medicines to treat a whole raft of cancers has secured yet another significant international deal for Cambridge based translational genomics company, Horizon Discovery.

And Business Weekly expects Horizon to announce two other blockbusters with major pharma in the coming weeks.

Its latest coup has seen Horizon sign a commercial agreement with Belgian computational fragment based drug discovery biotech Silicos NV relating to its X-MAN technology.

Horizon’s X-MAN (Mutant And Normal) cell-line technology provides the first genetically-defined and patient-relevant in vitro models of human cancer.

These models are being used by a growing number of pharma and biotech companies to rationalise key steps of the ‘targeted’ drug development process and therefore accelerate and economise the burgeoning field of ‘personalised’ medicine.

The agreement covers the testing of a number of Silicos lead compounds on human isogenic cell-lines comprising specific genotypes targeted by the compound series.

The approach will enable Silicos to gather information relating to the selectivity and mode-of-action of their compounds using model in-vitro systems.

Dr Darrin M Disley, chairman of Horizon said: “The proprietary multi-target virtual screening approach being taken by Silicos is an exciting development and should lead to the discovery of novel and high-quality lead compounds for the treatment of a large variety of diseases including cancer.

“Horizon believes that its patient-relevant disease models will allow the determination of key compound selectivity information on Silicos lead compounds.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.