By Lois M. Collins

A Massachusetts company with strong Utah ties is approaching the finding and fixing of cancerous tumors as an engineering challenge. It believes most solid tumors are triggered by one or more of six distinct systemic signaling-mechanism breakdowns and it's developing treatments to repair them.

Merrimack Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday announced a $530 million exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with French pharmaceutical giant sanofi-aventis for the development and co-commercialization of a drug targeting the first of those signaling breakdowns.

Developing drugs to treat diseases including cancer often involves throwing every compound you can think of at it to see what elicits the response you want, says Utahn Gary Crocker, chairman of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals and president of Utah's Crocker Ventures LLC. But with new technologies that make it easier to look inside cells and see how they "cross talk," Merrimack decided to view cancer as an engineering problem with an engineered solution. Merrimack uses network biology, which is a combination of computer modeling and efficient analysis of cell signaling networks.

Spotted here