Pharma Companies Join Drug Safety Research Project

Multiple pharmaceutical companies have signed on to participate in a £14-million (approximately $17.47-million) research project focused on drug safety, according to a Jan. 29, 2017 press announcement. The project will be led by AbbVie and co-coordinated by the University of Liverpool. The collaboration includes several other big pharma companies including Eli Lilly, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and Janssen.

The project is called Translational Quantitative Systems Toxicology to Improve the Understanding of the Safety of Medicines (TransQST). TransQST is a five-year partnership between 10 academic institutions, three small and medium-sized enterprises, and eight pharmaceutical companies. One of the main focuses of the research, which is funded by Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (IMI2), is to better understand adverse drug reactions (ADR) through a variety of modeling approaches. The project will focus specifically on off-target adverse reactions with a focus on the liver, kidneys, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems.

"The fear of ADRs is a major impediment to the development of new, safe, and effective therapies,” said Kevin Park, professor at University's Institute of Translational Medicine and co-coordinator of the project, in a statement. "This project will enable us to leverage the best available data and expertise from both public and private domains to generate and validate novel computational models that will help to address the problems of safe drug development. Our ultimate aim is to maximize the benefits of medicines and minimize the harm."

Source: Eureka Alert, University of Liverpool