SimuGen Ltd: reliable, early prediction of drug toxicity with toxicogenomics, human cell culture and computational models

Abstract

Toxicogenomics is, arguably, the most exciting endeavor to better understand and/or predict the toxicity of drugs during their development, using technologies such as gene-expression microarrays. Through much of its (sometimes overzealous) build-up, toxicogenomics has found a natural niche as a bioinformatics and/or pattern-recognition tool, aiming to improve the mechanistic understanding of toxicity and animal-to-human extrapolation. The problem is that current approaches still need maturing and are expensive, slow, highly variable, often qualitative and do not easily yield information useful to decide whether to progress a drug candidate or not. Most crucially, they fail to address the main problem that industry faces--to be able to predict toxicity earlier in the discovery/development process. Rather than providing a conventional animal toxicogenomics service, SimuGen Ltd is launching a product that models gene expression in human cell culture, using an entirely novel approach to predict a remarkable spectrum of human in vivo (clinical) toxic end points, and to predict dose-toxicity relationships and molecular structure-toxicity relationships.