St. Joseph, Michigan – GeneGo announced the availability of ToxHunter™, the first commercial release of tools and content developed through its industry-FDA MetaTox™ partnership program, a collaborative program developing a unique comprehensive systems toxicology suite designed for compound safety assessment in chemical and pharmaceutical R&D.

ToxHunter is now available as an add-on to existing licenses of GeneGo’s MetaCore™ and/or MetaDrug™ systems biology and systems pharmacology platforms.

ToxHunter includes a unique, detailed ontology of compound-induced pathological observations covering 8 target organs in the initial release. This ontology is populated with a comprehensive, manually-curated knowledgebase of toxicant associations to pathology terms along with gene, protein, metabolite biomarkers of chemical toxicity. Content is searchable by pathology, toxicant, or gene, protein & metabolite biomarkers. ToxHunter enables new experimental analysis and visualization tools such as an exclusive enrichment module for identifying specific gene-pathology associations, a suite of new toxicity-focused pathway maps and QSAR models, and the ability to overlay toxicity biomarker information on maps and interaction networks.

“We are excited to provide this unique and powerful set of tools to better support our customers in safety assessment, who are making increased use of existing knowledge in concert with their own molecular data, in a systems approach to understand and predict adverse outcomes of chemical exposure.” said Richard Brennan, Director Toxicology. “We will expand the capabilities of the platform in regular future updates, as more of the tools developed by the partnership are released.”

“Our toxicology customers recognize the value of ToxHunter to their research.” said Julie Bryant, VP Business Development. “The enthusiastic responses to demonstrations of pre-release versions, and strong pre-release sales to government, academic, clinical, and commercial customers validate the partnership program’s ability to deliver tools and content with value in the marketplace.” Numerous organizations, including Merck-Serono, The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, and the National Toxicology Program of the NIEHS have already licensed ToxHunter under GeneGo’s pre-sale program.