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Gentronix and Apredica Ally to Create Predictive-Toxicology Service
Joint Service Offering to Increase Drug Development Success and the Safety of
New Drugs on the Market
Manchester, UK – 10 June 2009
– Gentronix Limited, a genotoxicity product and services provider, and
Apredica, an ADME-Tox contract research laboratory, today announced a
strategic alliance to provide drug-discovery support services in the area of
predictive toxicology. The objective of the alliance is to reduce the failure
rate of drugs in late development, particularly due to toxicity, thereby
improving the efficiency of drug discovery and increasing assurance that new
drugs are safe.
“Gentronix and Apredica have worked closely together for over a year,” said Dr
Katya Tsaioun, President of Apredica. “We have developed a joint predictive
toxicology offering based on a set of assays that accurately predict many
known mechanisms of human toxicities.” In addition to the joint service
offering, UK-based Gentronix and US-based Apredica have also agreed to become
mutual agents.
The alliance offers a new suite of predictive in vitro toxicology services to
help improve the speed and efficiency of drug development. Commenting on the
announcement, John Nicholson, Chairman and CEO of Gentronix said: “Early
prediction of genotoxicity and attrition-rate improvement is critical to the
success of drug discovery. Our alliance with Apredica allows our customers to
concentrate resources on compounds most likely to succeed in development, and
to select the best candidates for clinical trials sooner."
Drug discovery and development programs see many drug candidates fail in
clinical-trial stages, which are the most costly and time-consuming stages of
drug development. Dr Tsaioun explains: “Many of these failures could have been
avoided through the application of early ADME testing and toxicity profiling,
which can quickly and cost-effectively identify drug candidates with
characteristics that would preclude regulatory approval. Early identification
of these sure-to-fail candidates saves not only millions of dollars, but also
months or years of research time that could have gone towards producing a
successful drug candidate. Our joint service offering with Gentronix will
provide new information that drug-discovery teams can use to reduce the risk
of expensive, later stage failure, to increase the likelihood of program
success, and to accelerate their programs towards IND.”
Reducing attrition rates in drug development, especially the later stages of
development, is critical to increasing the success and efficiency of drug
discovery. Identifying problems with new chemical entities as early as
possible allows resources to be directed towards chemistries with greater
propensities to advance to candidate selection and on to clinical evaluation.
ENDS
Editor’s note
About Apredica
Apredica is a specialist ADME-Tox CRO providing preclinical contract testing
services for the evaluation and optimization of the ADME-Tox properties of
drug candidates early in the drug-discovery process. Apredica maximizes the
speed and efficiency of drug discovery, and helps de-risk drug-discovery
programs by providing timely information on the safety, absorption, and
toxicity properties of small molecules to enable drug-discovery programs to
focus their resources on the molecules most likely to succeed.
Apredica
Watertown, Massachusetts, United States of America
Contact: Katya Tsaioun, Ph.D., President
Email: katya@apredica.com
Website: www.apredica.com
About Gentronix Ltd
Gentronix provides services and solutions for a wide range of
chemistry-driven industries that help reduce attrition rates and ensure safer
products. Gentronix’ primary focus is on providing better hazard
identification assays for genotoxicity through its GreenScreen® and BlueScreen
™ human cell assay technology. All Gentronix assays are designed for use much
earlier in drug and compound discovery than the standard battery of
genotoxicity tests, and provide positive results that are more accurately
predictive of in vivo risk than the current in vitro mammalian assays. In
addition, the high specificity of the assays means that valuable compounds are
not discarded due to false positive toxicology.
Gentronix Ltd
Manchester, United Kingdom
Contact: John Nicholson, Chairman and CEO
Email:
john.nicholson@gentronix.co.uk
Website: www.gentronix.co.uk
For further press information, please contact:
James Parker, Barrett Dixon Bell Ltd,
Email: jamesparker@bdb.co.uk
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