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January 15th: Pharmaceutical Toxicology: The Science of Safety

The first TBI breakfast meeting of 2009 took place January 15th, with more than 80 members and non-members in attendance. It featured two U.S. company presentations, one a contract research organization, the other a research company providing services in preclinical profiling and modeling.

The presenters, Dr. Jim McKim CSO and founder of CeeTox and Dr. Phil Burton CEO and CSO of ADMETRx highlighted the need to identify the winners in the drug discovery process earlier and advance only these candidates into clinical development in order save companies millions. The problem has always been of course, in sorting through the winners and losers and not being able to distinguish between the two until it’s too late.

CeeTox is a contract research organization focusing on providing in-vitro screens that predict toxicity in new compound entities for companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical and cosmetic industries worldwide. CeeTox works with a variety of cell types, cell lines and primary cells.

“We are experts in cell culture, assay development and in vitro biochemical assays for in-vivo prediction,” stated McKim.

CeeTox proprietary process for analyzing the dose-response data, combined with the company’s internal database, has enabled the company to provide an accurate assessment of compound toxicity.

Likewise Dr. Phil Burton’s company ADMETRx seeks to address the critical need for additional tools for predicting efficacy and toxicity.

With the number of drug candidates that survive Phase I clinical trials, but fail in Phase II or III due to efficacy or toxicity issues, both of these companies are working to provide more effective predictive tools and decision-making models to their pharmaceutical and biotech customers that they in turn can utilize earlier on in the drug discovery process.