Prestigious line-up of pharma, academia and SMEs aim to improve security in drug development process

CAMBRIDGE, UK – Optibrium™, a developer of software for small molecule drug discovery, today announced that it will join the Enhancing Translational Safety Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management (eTRANSAFE) project. eTRANSAFE is a five-year, 40 million EUR European collaboration between private and public organisations which seeks to improve safety assessment across the drug discovery and development process, ultimately with the aim of enabling the delivery of safer medicines.

Led by Novartis Pharma, with Bayer AG as deputy lead, the eTRANSAFE consortium partners 8 academic institutions, 6 SMEs and 12 pharma companies. It is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (IMI 2) together with the pharmaceutical industry and coordinated by the Fundació Institut Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM).

The eTRANSAFE project will carry out key efforts in the field of data standardisation and quality control, promoting the development and implementation of relevant data sharing policies and procedures that will have a great global impact in the community. eTRANSAFE will catalyse the transformation of drug safety modelling from monolithic applications and isolated data repositories to an open innovation ecosystem based on open standards, modular components and data integration services.

Dr Edmund Champness, Optibrium’s CSO, commented: “We are very proud to contribute to the eTRANSAFE project and this important effort to improve safety assessment in drug discovery. Optibrium look forward to leading the development of new visualisation approaches to understanding translational safety data, so that researchers can more effectively identify candidate drugs with better safety profiles.  This will also support our own research into methods for the optimisation and selections of compounds, enabling researchers to efficiently focus their efforts on compounds with the best chance of success in becoming effective therapies.”

Project leader Francois Pognan from Novartis said: “The safety of new drug candidates in first clinical trials is extrapolated based on preclinical animal data. These extrapolations are made using solely the data generated for the project at hand, since a global and systematic analysis of predictivity of the entire collective historical data pool has never been made.”

Deputy leader Thomas Steger-Hartmann from Bayer added:  “It is often poorly known to what extent and frequency an observed effect in an animal species may translate into a human effect.”

Professor Ferran Sanz, coordinator of the project said: “eTRANSAFE will improve translational safety assessment and contribute to the key scientific policies, such as the reduce, reuse, recycle (3Rs) one and the FAIR principles for data sharing.”

For further information on Optibrium and StarDrop, please visit www.optibrium.com/stardrop/, contact [email protected] or call +44 1223 815900.

For more information about eTRANSAFE project please visit: www.etransafe.eu/