Progenics gets rights to PSMA therapies

Progenics Pharmaceuticals has acquired complete control of PSMA Development by buying Cytogen's 50 percent interest for $13.2 million up front and up to $52 million in milestone payments. The venture has been developing in vivo cancer immunotherapies based on prostate-specific membrane antigen. PSMA is a protein primarily found on the surface of prostate cancer cells and new blood vessels associated with other solid tumors. Targeting PSMA offers the potential for highly specific cancer therapy.

"Having acquired all rights to in vivo PSMA immunotherapies, we now plan to develop them fully," said Paul J. Maddon, Progenics' founder and CEO. "Prostate cancer patients with metastatic disease have the greatest unmet medical need, and we intend to initiate phase 1 clinical studies in this setting in 2007 with our PSMA ADC. Progenics has core research and development, manufacturing, clinical, and regulatory teams in place and plans to leverage them to expedite PSMA-based drug development."

- here's the release