SafeTEC™ (Drug Safety Technology Consortium)
This innovative technology can make a very positive impact on the way drug discovery is performed.
Boston, MA (PRWEB) November 11, 2016
SafeTEC™, the Drug Safety Technology Consortium managed by One Million Solutions in Health (OMSiH) is announcing today a TEC Validation Project™ with Cyclica Inc., a Toronto-based in silico drug discovery company that offers a novel predictive analytics platform to help develop small molecule therapies.
Cyclica has developed and patented a computational platform, Ligand Express™, which streamlines the identification of safer and more efficacious drugs. Cyclica is collaborating with SafeTEC™ in this prospective validation study to verify the Cyclica in silico results with industry-conducted in vitro experiments.
The SafeTEC™ consortium, comprised of biotech and pharmaceutical companies, is mandated to identify and evaluate promising drug safety technologies. Accordingly, SafeTEC™ will evaluate Cyclica’s platform in a controlled study and is looking for additional pharmaceutical and biotech partners to participate.
Cyclica takes a unique and novel approach to understanding a drug’s properties by employing a structure-based methodology for identifying all proteins likely to interact with the drug. This method reveals a drug’s proteome-wide polypharmacology, which governs its therapeutic role in the body, as well as its possible off-target effects, including common side-effects and more serious adverse effects. Cyclica couples its structure-based method with systems biology tools to best contextualize the significance of a drug’s predicted polypharmacology and potential for toxicity, in order to risk-adjust development pipelines and identify best-in-class drug candidates.
The SafeTEC™ consortium sees promise in Cyclica’s disruptive technology, and is excited to evaluate its capabilities for broader application as a standard technology in the development pipeline of pharmaceutical companies. Members of SafeTEC™, which includes representatives from large organizations like AbbVie, Allergan and Pfizer to name a few, will provide Cyclica with the chemical structures of several drug-like molecules that have been well-characterized by their companies (i.e., the molecule’s polypharmacology profile is known internally but is not available to the public).
Using only the chemical structure provided, the Ligand Express™ platform will, in an unbiased manner, generate polypharmacological profiles for each molecule examined. SafeTEC™ members will then cross-check internal in vitro results with Cyclica’s in silico predictions to evaluate the predictive power of the platform. Additionally, if initial results are promising, member organizations will undertake an effort to validate novel predictions generated by Cyclica’s platform to further understand the drug’s potential effect in patients.
“While we have undergone extensive effort to validate our own technology internally, the SafeTEC™ project is an important opportunity to evaluate and ultimately demonstrate the utility and value of Ligand Express™ to the broader pharmaceutical audience,” says President and CEO, Naheed Kurji. “An opportunity to collaborate with established industrial partners in such a manner is completely unique, and showcases OMSiH’s commitment to discovering technologies that will bring about improvements to health with the end goal of developing safer and more effective drugs, more efficiently.”
The project will commence soon, but there is still an opportunity for more members to join this non-profit consortium and observe the results of the study first-hand. Companies participating in the study have the benefit of assessing and contributing to a novel and disruptive technology, which could further optimize internal drug development procedures. Note: There is no fee for pharmaceutical or biotech companies that are approved for membership by the consortium.
The SafeTEC™ Consortium is managed by OMSiH’s CEO and Founder, Dawn Van Dam. “Cyclica’s technology represents a unique and impactful tool that the SafeTEC™ team is eager to validate,” said Van Dam. “This innovative technology can make a very positive impact on the way drug discovery is performed. The opportunity to manage the exploration and validation of the Cyclica platform with our industry partners is an important step in identifying how this tool can drive the development of safer drugs.”
The study plans to be kicked off at the end of November 2016. Results of the study will be publicly disclosed in a follow-up press release.
ABOUT SafeTEC™ and One Million Solutions in Health™
The SafeTEC™ consortium of pharmaceutical and biotech companies, which is managed by One Million Solutions in Health™ (http://www.onemillionsolutionsinhealth.org), is tasked with identifying new technologies that will improve the industry’s drug discovery process. The consortium operates in the pre-competitive drug safety space to find, evaluate and validate new technologies more quickly, with less time and money than if it was invested by individual companies.
Technologies that are being preferentially investigated focus on systems that provide mechanism of action data, for both therapeutic and/or adverse effects. Additionally, we are validating tools where the output from the assays will increase our understanding and can therefore be used in the early stages of compound selection and optimization. And, we are working to validate new technologies, e.g., organ-on-a-chip and in silico modeling tools. The 'honest broker' role of the Consortium puts small technology companies and industry on common ground. The Consortium helps these companies meet industry requirements, identify gaps, and explain how you can optimize the value you are providing, thereby enhancing your commercial success.
ABOUT Cyclica Inc.
Cyclica Inc. (http://www.cyclicarx.com), headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a bioinformatics and systems biology company that has developed and patented the Ligand Express™ platform that improves drug discovery and development by reducing complex Big Data into high utility insights. The ligand-centric platform evaluates and compares small molecules, whether hypothetical, pre-clinical, clinical, or FDA-approved, to predict how each will interact with the entire structurally-characterized proteome. Cyclica provides proteome-wide polypharmacological profiles that are useful in identifying unknown targets, prioritizing lead candidates, elucidating adverse effects and pointing to repurposing opportunities for traditional “blockbuster” diseases, as well as rare/orphan diseases.
Media Contact:
Dawn Van Dam
dawn.vandam (at) onemillionsolutionsinhealth (dot) org
416-402-8274