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New £5.5 million R&D Programme to develop new predictive models for preclinical drug development

28 Feb 2005 - ITI Life Sciences , together with CXR Biosciences and Artemis Pharmaceuticals announced the launch of a new £5.5 million R&D programme to develop new screening and safety models to more accurately predict the effects of drug compounds and their breakdown products in the human body.
 
Accurate determination of these compound properties plays a crucial role in the early drug development process in determining whether or not to progress a drug candidate into human clinical trials. Such predictive studies could substantially increase the efficiency of drug discovery and development by allowing the identification of compounds with the correct pharmacokinetic and toxicity profile at a very early stage and thereby avoid the costly development of problematic compounds. The global market for metabolism and toxicity testing is estimated to be currently worth US$3 billion.
 
This second ITI Life Sciences programme will be conducted as a collaboration between CXR Biosciences and Artemis Pharmaceuticals. Both companies will provide complementary research expertise and will jointly commercialise the programme outputs.
 
In addition to its primary goal outlined above, these predictive technologies could be used to re-evaluate or 'rescue' compounds that were abandoned at the preclinical stage because of negative results from studies using less relevant models. These compounds could then be entered back into the drug development process.