Gentronix and Apredica Ally To Create Predictive-Toxicology Service
Gentronix Limited, a genotoxicity product and services provider, and Apredica, an ADME-Tox contract research laboratory, recently 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.
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.
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.
SOURCE: Gentronix Limited and Apredica