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April 12, 2016
PRINCETON, NJ – Apr. 12, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today launched the Simcyp In Vitro (Data) Analysis (SIVA) Toolkit 2.0 to assist drug development researchers with the analysis of complex in vitro studies. These studies are used to assess candidate drugs’ metabolism, transport and formulation properties.
“Global regulatory agencies are increasingly expecting sponsors to have a strong mechanistic understanding of drug metabolism, transport, and solubility/dissolution,” said Steve Toon, BPharm, PhD, President of Simcyp. “And the broader scientific community, including The International Transporter Consortium, which contains members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, are advocating the use of model-based approaches to maximize the value of data arising out of in vitro ADME studies. The SIVA Toolkit supports these types of data analyses which also in turn maximize the Simcyp® Population-based Simulator’s predictive capabilities.”
The most valuable biosimulation models have two things in common – they are built using the most appropriate and highest quality data. The SIVA Toolkit provides better, richer and more relevant data from in vitro ADME experiments.
For example, permeability/transport assays measure how drugs move through the body, pass through cells, use transporters, get metabolized or a combination of all of them. While conventional in vitro analysis provides a single, global permeability value, the SIVA Toolkit generates parameters describing each of those physiological processes. SIVA’s approach ensures that researchers don’t lose any of that valuable information, which makes the resulting PBPK models more complete, powerful and relevant.
A standalone product, the SIVA Toolkit also allows researchers to optimize their in vitro ADME experiments, reducing the number of experiments and thus saving both time and money. It also gives sponsors more confidence to make important clinical trial decisions, such as determining whether they need to conduct certain studies.
It is a very user-friendly solution which features a predefined library of models for assessing drug metabolism, inhibition, transport and pharmaceutical formulation.
The SIVA Toolkit 2.0 now offers models for enzyme inhibition, allowing researchers to predict drug-drug interactions more accurately. It also includes Pharmaceutics-USP IV, Serial Dilution, Transfer and Two Phase Dissolution models.
Certara is also hosting a complimentary one-hour webinar entitled “SIVA Toolkit: Get the most from your in vitro data” on Thursday, April 14 at 11 a.m. EDT. Register for this event.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
April 05, 2016
March 24, 2016
March 24, 2016
PRINCETON, NJ – Mar. 24, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that its regulatory and medical consultancy, Synchrogenix, has introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) -enabled solution to meet the data transparency requirements of the clinical and drug development market. Those detailed requirements were published by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Mar. 2, 2016 as Policy 70 (http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Regulatory_and_procedural_guideline/2016/03/WC500202621.pdf).
EMA has been working with the industry for several years to develop a set of rules to make clinical trial data more public. In January 2015, the agency released new transparency and disclosure rules related to clinical study reports contained in marketing authorization applications submitted on or after that date. The first reports are expected to be made publicly available in September 2016. The rules that EMA published earlier this month expand the breadth and depth of the original rules, and provide detailed requirements for companies to follow.
“Disclosing clinical trial information so that researchers can build upon prior knowledge is an important step in bringing new therapies to patients, and fostering the industry’s commitment to the patients it serves,” said Synchrogenix President Kelley Kendle. “At the same time, we must protect the confidential patient and personal information contained in the myriad clinical reports to be published under Policy 70, which are often hundreds of pages long. In anticipation of these regulations and concerns around protecting patient privacy, Synchrogenix has developed technology that automates the redaction of personally-identifiable information, patient-protected data, and company-confidential information with 99 percent accuracy.”
Synchrogenix’s technology is the only AI-enabled solution in the biopharmaceutical industry. Built on natural language processing and recognition, this technology is able to identify individual words, parts of speech, and word and phrasing combinations automatically to determine context. This technology supports drug companies’ need to redact and de-identify datasets in their clinical study reports, patient narratives, patient data listings, and submission documents, in order to publish their clinical study information publicly. Synchrogenix’s technology is scalable and has already been successfully applied at both large pharma and smaller biotech organizations, quickly delivering accurately redacted documents.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
March 22, 2016
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March 04, 2016
PRINCETON, NJ – Mar. 4, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that its scientists will be participating in 12 sessions at the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) 2016 Annual Meeting. This conference will be held from Mar. 8-12 at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego, CA.
“Biosimulation (modeling and simulation) has become a trusted approach of sponsors, payers and regulatory agencies and it is now being used to optimize and increase the predictability of the most crucial R&D, regulatory and patient care decisions,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD.
“At ASCPT, we will demonstrate how physiologically-based pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling can help determine appropriate drug dosing in vulnerable populations such as pediatric and elderly patients, pregnant women, and those who have cancer or have received an organ transplant,” said Chief Scientific Officer Amin Rostami, PharmD, PhD.
“We will also provide examples where we have used Model-Based Meta-Analysis to study the comparative effectiveness of different treatments,” added President of Certara Strategic Consulting Jaap Mandema, PhD.
Certara’s contributions to this year’s ASCPT Annual Meeting are outlined below:
Tuesday, Mar. 8
Pre-conference Sessions
8:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
2:55-3:20 p.m.
Posters
8:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Thursday, Mar. 10
Posters
4:30-6:30 p.m.
Friday, Mar. 11
Posters
7:00-9:00 a.m.
For additional information about this conference, please visit http://www.ascpt.org/ASCPT-2016-Annual-Meeting.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
March 04, 2016
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February 25, 2016
February 25, 2016
New Services Portfolio Supports Users of Certara’s Gold Standard Phoenix Software
PRINCETON, NJ – Feb. 25, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced the introduction of Phoenix® Technology Services. These services, led and implemented by Certara’s professional team of biosimulation (modeling and simulation) experts, include customized and ready-to-use solutions that span the breadth of the Phoenix platform. Phoenix is the industry’s premier software platform for managing, analyzing and reporting pharmacokinetic (PK), pharmacodynamic (PD), and toxicokinetic (TK) data. Certara has developed these services to leverage the enormous power of Phoenix by systematizing the ‘best practices’ of its more than 6,000 users and making those practices available to all biopharm organizations.
“Biosimulation has had a profoundly positive impact on drug development and is now expected by global regulators. In fact, 95 percent of the 45 new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 used the technology to inform label claims. Additionally, the industry trend is toward moving R&D decision-making around drug viability earlier in the development process and using biosimulation to inform that process,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD. “The Phoenix Technology Services portfolio is being introduced to help our clients leverage Phoenix software to take advantage of these trends in both pre-clinical and clinical development.”
Certara is introducing several new services within the Phoenix Technology Services portfolio:
Clients can learn more about these services at www.certara.com/software/about-our-software-services/ and by attending the 2016 Phoenix Roadshow to be held in Basel, Switzerland; Cambridge, UK; Raleigh, NC; San Diego, CA; Chicago, IL; Princeton, NJ; Boston, MA; Shanghai, China; and Osaka and Tokyo, Japan.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
February 24, 2016
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February 03, 2016
PRINCETON, NJ – Feb. 3, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that it has appointed Andrzej Kierzek, PhD, as head of systems modeling in its Simcyp® Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) Group. He joins Certara from the University of Surrey, UK, where he serves as professor of systems biology.
Certara established its market-leading position in QSP with the acquisition of XenologiQ, a UK-based QSP consultancy, in December 2015.
QSP bridges the gap between pharmacometric modeling and simulation, and systems biology. QSP combines computational modeling and experimental methods to examine the mechanistic relationships between a drug, the biological system, and the disease process. In combination with physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PBPK), QSP forms the basis for precision medicine and can assist in identifying the best dose and combination of drugs for an individual patient. QSP is expected to have an immediate impact not only in large therapeutic areas like oncology, immunology/inflammation and cardiometabolic diseases, but also in rare diseases and safety/toxicology.
“QSP is a relatively new discipline with the potential to dramatically improve pharma R&D productivity,” said Steve Toon, BPharm, PhD, president of Simcyp. “We are delighted to have a systems modeler of Andrzej’s caliber join our rapidly-growing QSP team. This is an incredibly exciting stage in the development and adoption of QSP and we aim to have all the brightest minds on board.”
Professor Kierzek has 20 years’ experience developing computer simulations of biological systems. He co-presented the first dynamic simulations, including regulatory mechanisms and a genome scale metabolic network, in a human cell. He is now working to apply this method of mechanistic modeling to cancer. He also developed the software to create computer simulations of genome scale metabolic networks in bacterial pathogens. Professor Kierzek has had 50 papers published to date in leading life sciences journals.
Professor Kierzek received a PhD in biophysics from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a Dr. hab. (Habilitation) in biological sciences and biochemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“Andrzej is a tremendous asset for our rapidly-growing organization, which already has teams in Canterbury and Sheffield, UK. His expertise in multi-scale modeling of oncology and immunology networks will be invaluable as we maximize our impact in these areas of highest need,” said Professor Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, PhD, vice president and head of Simcyp QSP.
Certara’s Simcyp Group is the industry-leading mechanistic and PBPK modeling organization and counts the majority of the top-40 pharma companies as its clients and members of the Simcyp Consortium. Key academic institutions, and global regulators, including the US Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, and Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency are consortium affiliates.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
February 02, 2016
January 21, 2016
January 20, 2016
January 20, 2016
January 20, 2016
This event runs from 1st – 5th August 2016 in Tokyo, Japan
Online booking for Simcyp events is now handled through the Simcyp Members’ Area. Your saved profile is automatically captured on the booking form so there is no need to re-enter your contact details. Click here to link to the booking forms – you will be prompted for your Simcyp Members’ Area user name (email address) and password. If you have forgotten your log-in credentials please follow the instructions on-screen.
If you have not yet registered for the Members’ Area please sign up now.
January 20, 2016
January 20, 2016
January 15, 2016
January 15, 2016
January 12, 2016
PRINCETON, NJ – Jan. 12, 2016 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced the launch of Certara Strategic Consulting China in Shanghai. This new company is being led by President and CEO Christine Yuying Gao, MD, PhD, former vice president of consulting services at Quantitative Solutions, a global pharmacometrics consulting company. Quantitative Solutions merged with Certara’s Pharsight Consulting Services in July 2015 to form Certara Strategic Consulting.
“The recent announcement that the China Food and Drug Administration has introduced new procedures for drug registration and approval demonstrates China’s commitment to increasing innovation in its healthcare system. Biosimulation is an innovation that will not only expedite bringing safer therapies to market, but also will support China’s expansion of its fast-track drug approval process. We are delighted to be able to provide biosimulation consulting support for our clients in China,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD.
Certara Strategic Consulting provides outsourced drug discovery and development modeling and simulation, and strategic pharmacometric services to more than 100 biopharm companies, non-profit foundations, and regulatory agencies worldwide. It also uses model-based meta-analysis to increase drug development productivity, quantitatively inform portfolio management, and improve clinical trial success. In addition, the organization’s unique clinical outcomes databases enable it to analyze the comparative effectiveness of a new drug within its competitive landscape.
“We are just starting to see the profound impact that biosimulation, model-based meta-analysis, and comparative effectiveness analysis can have on a drug candidate’s development, regulatory review, and clinical application. Certara can assist clients in maximizing their efforts at each of these stages,” said Dr. Yuying Gao.
Certara Strategic Consulting’s therapeutic areas of expertise include oncology, cardiovascular, orphan/rare diseases, central nervous system, pediatrics, immunology, infectious disease, metabolic and endocrine disease, women’s health, pain, respiratory and ophthalmology.
Dr. Yuying Gao has more than 20 years’ experience in clinical pharmacology research and drug development. She has partnered with more than 50 pharmaceutical companies and modeled more than 100 compounds in clinical development.
Dr. Yuying Gao conducted her postdoctoral fellowship in clinical pharmacology at the Department of Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine. She received her PhD in clinical pharmacology from the Jiaotong University School of Medicine and her MD in medical science from the Shanxi Medical University in China.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation and regulatory writing company, committed to optimizing drug development decisions. Its clients include hundreds of international biopharmaceutical companies, leading academic institutions, and key regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span drug discovery through patient care, increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success by using the most scientifically-advanced modeling and simulation technologies and regulatory strategies. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
December 14, 2015
PRINCETON, NJ – Dec. 14, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that it has been honored with a 2015 R&D 100 Award in the Software/Services category for Muse® Invent™. This awards program recognizes the 100 most innovative technologies and services of the past year.
Muse Invent allows researchers to create drug candidates with novel structures, scaffolds, or side-chains that meet multiple design objectives. It enables them to create parent structures and then score each generation of offspring until only the strongest drug candidates, those that satisfy all the design criteria, survive. Muse Invent can then describe the synthesis pathway required to create those newly-designed molecules. It is a revolutionary product that successfully bridges the gap between molecular design and synthetic chemistry.
“We are very proud that R&D Magazine chose to recognize Muse Invent’s innovative design with a 2015 R&D 100 Award. It really is an exciting product that enables researchers to design their dream molecules and then quickly determine if they are synthetically feasible. It’s both a creative and a practical tool,” said Brian Masek, a product manager at Certara.
When describing Muse Invent’s potential, R&D Magazine reported: “A successful drug design candidate exploits multiple parameters—potency at the target, selectivity, good ADME properties and minimal toxicity. Certara’s Muse Invent generates new ideas that satisfy these multiple drug design parameters, while empowering chemists to integrate additional computed properties and use them for design optimization.”
About the R&D 100 Awards
Since 1963, the R&D 100 Awards have identified revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market. Widely recognized as the “Oscars of Invention,” the R&D 100 Awards identify and celebrate the top technology products of the year. Past winners have included sophisticated testing equipment, innovative new materials, chemistry breakthroughs, biomedical products, consumer items, and high-energy physics spanning industry, academia, and government-sponsored research. For more information, visit http://www.rd100awards.com.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
December 08, 2015
PRINCETON, NJ – Dec. 8, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced the release of version 15 of its Simcyp® Population-based Simulator. The Simcyp Simulator is the pharmaceutical industry’s most sophisticated physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling and simulation platform for determining first-in-human dose selection, predicting drug-drug interactions (DDIs), understanding drug disposition in special populations, including pediatrics, and bridging to virtual ethnic populations. The Simcyp Simulator has increasingly been used to inform drug label language, with regulatory acceptance from the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency.
“Our work provides a framework for assessing inter-individual variability in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics using virtual human populations and integrating general knowledge of the physical chemistry of a drug with human biology, anatomy, physiology and genetics,” said Simcyp President Steve Toon, PhD. “The Simcyp Simulator allows us to accurately model drug disposition within human and various animal species so that we can inform on dose and dose regimen selection, DDIs, assess the impact of food effect on orally-administered medicines and evaluate impacts of disease and lifestyle factors.”
The Simcyp whole body simulation methodology can predict the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of small molecule and biological medicines using laboratory-derived data. The simulator includes a unique set of genetic, physiological and epidemiological databases that facilitate the simulation of virtual populations of differing demographies and ethnicities.
The majority of the top-40 pharma companies (including all of the top 10) are members of the Simcyp Consortium. The Simcyp Simulator v15 contains several new models and features requested by the Simcyp Consortium, including:
Simcyp Simulator v15 now offers a physiologically-based pharmacokinetic model for antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). ADCs are a new class of targeted therapies for oncology. They combine the ability of monoclonal antibodies to target cancer cells with the tumor cell killing ability of chemotherapy drugs. This new, scientifically complex therapeutic approach can have a breakthrough impact on the oncology market. According to the report “Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Outlook 2020,” the ADC market is anticipated to reach around $12.7 billion by 2020. This new Simcyp Simulator model enables mechanism-driven studies of ADCs and DDIs.
Certara has also enhanced Simcyp Simulator’s ADAM (Advanced Dissolution Absorption Metabolism) model. ADAM now adjusts for factors such as particle shape. ADAM also now contains a new precipitation model that includes lag time. In addition, the multi-layer gut wall within ADAM (M-ADAM) can model drug concentrations within the unstirred boundary layer, enterocyte compartments, active and passive drug permeation, transporter DDIs at both the apical and basolateral membranes, and lymphatic absorption from the intestinal interstitial fluid to the systemic circulation. The enhanced ADAM model helps sponsors develop more physiologically accurate and flexible models of drug disposition in the gut. These improvements also facilitate understanding the role of transporters in influencing bi-directional drug distribution across the gut wall.
Certara is a trailblazer in modeling pediatric patient populations and biologics. The latest version of the Simcyp Simulator facilitates modeling of biologics in pediatric populations. It incorporates age-related changes in system parameters such as IgG and IgE levels. Researchers can use this model to define population age, weight and height relationships. This new model provides unique insight into understanding the disposition of biologics in young children, an especially sensitive patient population.
Certara has also added a multiple-compartment permeability-limited lung model to the Simcyp Simulator. It models active and passive drug disposition in the lungs. This model helps sponsors gain a better understanding of drug absorption and metabolism in the lung. This development is partly supported by the Critical Path to TB Drug Regimens initiative. The lung model complements the previously developed models of the brain, liver, and kidney.
The Simcyp Simulator now comes bundled with a command line console which supports the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s DDMoRe Project Interoperability Framework. This new functionality will allow DDMoRe partners with a Simcyp Simulator license to run simulations in scripted workflows with other software such as NONMEM and PSN, Monolix, PFIM, and PopED. The console may be used independently of DDMoRe facilities, and users will benefit from the Simulator’s vast databases of populations, compounds and PBPK models through other platforms such as Matlab and R.
Further information about Simcyp Simulator v15 is available at http://www.certara.com/software/pbpk-modeling/simcyp-simulator. The Simcyp Simulator v15 can also be downloaded now.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
December 08, 2015
December 08, 2015
December 08, 2015
December 08, 2015
December 01, 2015
PRINCETON, NJ – Dec. 1, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that it has acquired XenologiQ, a UK-based quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) consultancy.
“This transaction strengthens Certara’s modeling and simulation capabilities, increases its leadership in mechanistic pharmacology, and supports the company’s precision medicine vision,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, M.D, Ph.D. “It also gives us access to the emerging QSP technology, which integrates quantitative knowledge about a compound with the understanding of the mechanism of action for a specific disease. QSP focuses on the behavior of biological systems as a whole, versus the behavior of individual components.”
The XenologiQ team will join Certara’s Simcyp® division. The directors of XenoloqiQ will take up leadership positions within the Simcyp QSP organization. Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, PhD, (currently professor of systems pharmacology, Leiden University, Netherlands) will become vice president QSP, and Neil Benson, PhD, (formerly head of systems pharmacology, Pfizer, Sandwich, UK) will become head of QSP operations. Professor van der Graaf is a global leader in QSP, holds several patents in the field of target discovery, and has authored more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters in the area of quantitative and translational pharmacology. He is also Editor-in-Chief of CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology, the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics’ journal.
Simcyp is the industry-leading mechanistic and physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling organization and counts the majority of the top-40 pharma companies as its clients and members of the Simcyp Consortium. Key academic institutions, and global regulators, including the US Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, and Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency are consortium affiliates.
QSP is an emerging biosimulation discipline that combines computational modeling and experimental methods to examine the mechanistic relationships between a drug, the biological system, and the disease process. QSP integrates quantitative drug data with knowledge of the drug’s mechanism of action. QSP modeling demonstrates, in a precise, predictive manner, how drugs modify cellular networks in space and time and how they impact and are impacted by human pathophysiology. Additionally, QSP facilitates the evaluation of complex, heterogeneous diseases such as cancer, immunological, metabolic and CNS diseases that require the combination of multiple therapies.
“Certara’s move into QSP is a natural extension of its leading position in biosimulation,” said Simcyp President Steve Toon, PhD. “The acquisition of XenologiQ signals the start of Certara’s commitment to become a world leader in the QSP space, furthering our objective of providing technology solutions that improve all aspects of the drug development process.”
“Combining PBPK with systems pharmacology is a natural fit. We see systems pharmacology models evolving alongside PBPK ones as new data becomes available to further inform crucial go/no-go decisions throughout the drug development continuum,” said Professor van der Graaf. “We look forward to joining Certara’s Simcyp team and increasing the depth of human disease biology included in its biosimulation modeling.”
Financial details about the transaction were not disclosed.
About XenologiQ
XenologiQ is a UK-based consulting company. Its mission is to productively implement state-of-the-art modeling and simulation in medical and life sciences research. Its value proposition is to achieve this via the optimal integration of experience, technical excellence and global talent. Its consultants have decades of experience in reducing modeling and simulation to effective practice in blue chip pharmaceutical R&D, in particular in pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modeling and applied systems biology/systems pharmacology. For further information, visit www.xenologiq.com.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
December 01, 2015
PRINCETON, NJ – Dec. 1, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that it has appointed Professor Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, PhD, as its vice president of quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and the head of its new Simcyp® QSP organization.
Van der Graaf is professor of systems pharmacology, chair of pharmacology, and director of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is also a former director of XenoloqiQ, the UK-based QSP consultancy, which Certara just acquired.
QSP combines computational modeling and experimental methods to examine the mechanistic relationships between a drug, the biological system, and the disease process.
“Certara recognizes the critical role that QSP is going to play in the global drug development and regulatory decision making processes. This innovative modeling approach provides a mechanistic understanding of the relationships between dose and pharmacological response and the inter-relationship with the disease and its progression,” said Simcyp President Steve Toon, PhD. “Piet is a global authority on QSP and the ideal person to head up our new Simcyp QSP organization. We are delighted to have him join our team.”
In the past, medical researchers thought that a single target – a receptor, channel, protein or enzyme – was responsible for causing a particular disease. However, that was found to be true in only a limited number of cases, most of which have been addressed. The remaining diseases are all manifestations of several changes in the system.
QSP helps to draw a map of biological networks and identify hot spots that need to be hit simultaneously to generate the desired effect. It provides vital intelligence for the drug discovery process by showing researchers what combined effects a successful drug candidate needs to have.
QSP can also assist in identifying the best dose and combination of drugs for an individual based on their own phenotypic traits, which are derived using a variety of tests.
“Certara is a leader in biosimulation and we have a shared vision of QSP’s potential,” said Professor van der Graaf. “We plan to add biological systems and disease process data to Certara’s Simcyp Simulator and further inform its population-based pharmacokinetic modeling and simulation. This will have a major impact on the industry.”
Professor van der Graaf is Editor-in-Chief of CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology, the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics’ journal, and a fellow of the British Pharmacological Society. He holds several target discovery patents and has (co-)authored more than 100 papers and book chapters on quantitative and translational pharmacology. He has given around 100 lectures at international symposia and workshops on these topics.
Professor van der Graaf has a PhD in clinical medicine. He received his doctorate training in quantitative receptor pharmacology with Nobel laureate Sir James Black at King's College London.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
November 27, 2015
November 18, 2015
November 09, 2015
November 03, 2015
November 02, 2015
Partnership provides pharmacometric biosimulation solutions for multiple FDA centers
PRINCETON, NJ – Nov. 2, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has outfitted its pharmacometrics teams with Certara’s Phoenix® software. Phoenix is the industry’s premier software platform for managing, analyzing and reporting pharmacokinetic (PK), pharmacodynamic (PD), and toxicokinetic (TK) data.
Certara’s partnership with the FDA dates back to 2001, when its Pharsight division (pharmacometric biosimulation software) formed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). That CRADA directly supported the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative, which advocates increased use of drug-disease modeling and simulation to improve the efficiency of the drug development process.
“We are extremely proud of our partnership with FDA, which not only includes the expanded use of Phoenix software for PK/PD, but leverages the Simcyp® Simulator for physiologically-based PK (PBPK) in regulatory review,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, M.D., Ph.D. “We routinely meet with the agency to collaborate and educate one another on the ever-increasing applications for biosimulation in drug development. Today’s announcement affirms the agency’s commitment to achieving its Critical Path Initiative goals via innovative technology.”
FDA has purchased almost 300 Phoenix licenses of Phoenix WinNonlin, Phoenix NLME and additional Phoenix tools for use across multiple divisions, including the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Center for Veterinary Medicine, Center for Tobacco Products, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Office of Generic Drugs, and Office of New Drug Products.
In its recently-published paper, Catalyzing the Critical Path Initiative: FDA’s Progress in Drug Development Activities, the agency identified computer-based predictive models for safety, efficacy, and disease progression as a key innovation toward improving health. Specifically, the article says, “Modeling and simulation [M/S] tools for drug exposure and its response have been useful in both pre- and post-market settings when questions related to safety and efficacy of therapeutic products arise. M/S has served as a useful predictive tool for dose selection for pivotal trials, dosing in select populations such as pediatrics, optimization of dose and dosing regimen in a subset patient population, prediction of efficacy and dosing in unstudied patient population in clinical trials, characterizing exposure and dose-related QT interval prolongation, and including PBPK modeling in predicting drug-drug interactions.”
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
October 22, 2015
Their contributions include workshops, symposia, roundtables, posters, and a sunrise session
PRINCETON, NJ – Oct. 23, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that its scientists are giving 22 presentations at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition being held in Orlando, FL from Oct. 25-29.
“Our growing presence at the AAPS Annual Meeting mirrors the rapid adoption of physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PBPK) modeling by global biopharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD. “PBPK modeling describes how drugs will be handled by the body and predicts PK in virtual patient populations. These models are increasingly used during regulatory review to help decide whether specific clinical trials are required, to inform study design, and guide appropriate labeling language.”
“PBPK modeling is also used to determine appropriate drug doses for specific patient populations such as pediatric patients, pregnant women, patients with organ impairment or comorbidities,” said Steve Toon, PhD, managing director of Certara’s Simcyp group. “Certara’s next goal is to achieve precision dosing, which will allow the company to recommend drug doses for individual patients,” he added.
Certara is releasing a video on precision dosing with AAPS TV during the conference. The video is also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrjdB98P5z4.
Certara’s contributions to this year’s AAPS Annual Meeting are outlined below:
Sunday, Oct. 25
Workshops
8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
9:20 - 9:45 a.m.
Monday, Oct. 26
Posters
11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Tuesday, Oct. 27
Symposia
9:40 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
11:10 –11:55 a.m.
Roundtable
10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Posters
8:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Wednesday, Oct. 28
Sunrise Session
7:30 - 8:45 a.m.
Symposium
9:40 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Roundtable
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Posters
8:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 29
Roundtable
10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Posters
8:00 - 11:30 a.m.
For more information about this conference, please visit https://annual.aapsmeeting.org.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
October 20, 2015
PRINCETON, NJ – Oct. 20, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that Japan’s new Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) has selected Certara’s Phoenix® WinNonlin® software for pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modeling and non-compartmental analysis of new drug candidates. AMED was launched on April 1, 2015 and fulfills a similar role to the National Institutes of Health in the United States.
“Considered the gold standard for PK/PD and non-compartmental analysis, Phoenix WinNonlin is being used by more than 6,500 researchers at more than 1,500 biopharm companies, academic institutions and global regulatory agencies,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD. “In fact, Phoenix WinNonlin is relied upon by 100 percent of leading pharma companies, according to survey results published in the January 2015 IQ Consortia report on preclinical PK/PD modeling. We are delighted that AMED chose to start working with Certara right away as the Agency expands its drug development analysis capabilities.”
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is counting on AMED to move drugs from the bench into the clinic and onto the market. AMED is expected to employ Phoenix WinNonlin to create PK profiles, and assess bioavailability for new drug candidates in its preclinical program. These data will help AMED’s domestic and international biopharmaceutical partners to identify which molecules hold the most therapeutic potential and should be progressed into clinical trials. AMED is currently testing about 200,000 samples provided by 10 biopharmaceutical companies. However, it plans to open the program to additional biopharmaceutical partners shortly. Its initial focus is on the development of drugs for cancer and infectious diseases. AMED will flag promising molecules for its partners and request that they develop them further.
Phoenix WinNonlin is the trusted, long-time industry standard software tool for PK/PD modeling, non-compartmental and compartmental analysis. It is easily validated, delivering accurate, reproducible and traceable results. WinNonlin has powerful graphics, an extensive model library, and its results can readily be shared in a single file with collaborators. It can also perform a bioequivalence analysis, or create a simulation of multiple doses, from single-dose data.
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of
biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which
span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and
regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more
information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
October 19, 2015
Diverse agenda underscores the widespread adoption of PBPK approaches throughout the drug development process
PRINCETON, NJ – Oct. 19, 2015 – Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced that its scientists are presenting 9 seminars and poster sessions at the twentieth International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (ISSX). This annual ISSX conference will be held in Orlando, FL from Oct. 18-22, 2015. A xenobiotic is a chemical that does not occur naturally in an organism, such as a drug or a pesticide.
“The mission of ISSX is to uncover the metabolism and disposition of chemicals in biological systems. This focus dovetails perfectly with our Simcyp® Simulator technology, which uses mechanistic approaches to predict the effects of drugs in virtual populations,” said Certara Chief Marketing Officer Ellen Leinfuss.
Speakers
Posters
For further information about this conference, please visit: https://issx.site-ym.com/page/20NAISSXInvite/?
About Certara
Certara is a global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company. Its customers include hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies around the globe, together with several regulatory agencies. Certara’s solutions, which span the discovery, preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, enable superior drug development and regulatory decision-making through biosimulation, thus increasing R&D productivity and commercial value. For more information, visit www.certara.com.
Certara Contact:
Ellen Leinfuss, 609-216-9586
Chief Marketing Officer
Media Contact:
Lisa Osborne, 206-992-5245
Rana Healthcare Solutions
lisa@ranahealth.com
October 12, 2015
In a large (30 Million €) H2020-supported collaborative project, academia joins forces with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large industry, contract research organizations (CROs) and regulatory bodies to achieve a paradigm shift in toxicology towards a more efficient and animal-free chemical safety assessment.
PRINCETON, NJ, Oct. 12, 2015
An international consortium of 39 partner organizations will be funded by the European Commission to work on the integration of new concepts for regulatory chemical safety assessment. These new concepts involve cutting-edge human-relevant in vitro non-animal methods and in silico computational technologies to translate molecular mechanistic understanding of toxicity into safety testing strategies. The ultimate goal is to deliver reliable, animal-free hazard and risk assessment of chemicals.
Coordinated by Bob van de Water, Professor of Toxicology at Leiden University (The Netherlands), EU-ToxRisk intends to become the European flagship for animal-free chemical safety assessment. The project will integrate advancements in cell biology, omics technologies, systems biology and computational modeling to define the complex chains of events that link chemical exposure to toxic outcome. The consortium will provide proof of concept for a new mechanism-based chemical safety testing strategy with a focus on repeated-dose systemic toxicity as well as developmental and reproductive toxicity. Importantly, novel mechanism-based test methods will be integrated in fit-for-purpose testing batteries that are in line with the regulatory framework and will meet industrial implementation. EU-ToxRisk will develop new quantitative risk assessment approaches based on understanding of so-called “Adverse Outcome Pathways” incorporating all mechanistic toxicity data available in the public domain. It will also achieve a rapid improvement of so-called “read across” approaches as the most important data-gap filling and hence animal-saving alternative method at present. Thus, the project strives towards faster safety evaluation of the many chemicals used by industry and society.
“Certara is proud to participate in this international effort to develop reliable, efficient, animal-free toxicology tests for agrochemicals, industrial chemicals, and cosmetics,” said Certara Chief Executive Officer Edmundo Muniz, MD, PhD. “We plan to demonstrate the pivotal role that physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modeling and simulation can play in improving toxicology testing.”
Dr. Susanne Hougaard Bennekou from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency explained: “Safety evaluation is largely based on animal testing. This is the best we have today. However, there are widely recognized limitations, these being that the sensitivity and specificity of animal-based safety testing could lead to wrong predictions of chemical-induced human adversities. Whilst false-negative results compromise human safety, false-positive animal tests and use of unnecessarily large safety factors may lead to the loss of beneficial and safe chemicals and drugs.” Professor Marcel Leist, head of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Europe (CAAT-Europe) in Konstanz, Germany, added: “Ethical issues related to the use of experimental animals as well as economic considerations (high costs, time delay by testing) demand a paradigm shift, away from ‘black box’ animal testing towards a toxicological assessment based on responses observed in human cells and a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of cause-consequence relationships of adverse chemical effects.”
EU-ToxRisk builds on testing strategies and knowledge developed in previous national and European projects, including the SEURAT-1 program, a cluster of seven projects in the field of animal-free safety assessment: 2010-2015 (http://www.seurat-1.eu). The EU-ToxRisk consortium includes many of Europe’s leading toxicologists and experts in related fields such as cell and developmental biology, genomics, computational biology, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, regulatory sciences, as well as management and dissemination, from a range of organizational backgrounds and covering several industry sectors. This breadth of expertise will allow EU-ToxRisk to develop efficient and innovative safety testing strategies, covering the whole range of stakeholders, to ensure fit-for-purpose solutions, practical routine applicability and quick uptake of results. EU-ToxRisk will establish strong ties with the European Union Reference Laboratory for alternatives to animal testing (EURL-ECVAM), hosted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Health and Consumer Protection, to establish novel alternative testing strategies that are fit for regulatory purposes. In addition, the project will strongly collaborate with ongoing safety and risk assessment initiatives across the globe, including the Tox21 initiative in the United States.
Dr. Rob Taalman, Science and Research Director at Cosmetics Europe, the Brussels-based Personal Care Association, which co-funded the SEURAT-1 cluster with the European Commission, said: “We are thrilled to be part of this strategic EU project. This joint action restates our long-held commitment to be at the forefront of research into alternatives to animal testing. For more than 20 years, the industry has been pushing the boundaries of cutting-edge science to develop technologies that would feed into novel, sustainable safety testing strategies in line with the European regulatory framework. Since the ban on animal testing within the cosmetics industry, there is the wish and the scientific capabilities to improve safety assessment approaches based on alternatives.”
Overall, EU-ToxRisk intends to evolve a new era for European safety sciences. At the end of the project the novel risk assessment strategies should find wide application in various regulatory contexts, across industry sectors, and for different population groups, such as patients, workers, consumers, and the society at large. Altogether, EU-ToxRisk expects to have a strong impact on the future regulatory chemical safety and risk assessment in Europe as well as the rest of world.
The EU-ToxRisk project will kick-off in January 2016 in Leiden, The Netherlands, and will run for six years.
Project Partners
Universities
Research Institutions
Large industry
SMEs
Regulatory bodies
Research funder
For further information on EU-ToxRisk and the project partners see: www.eu-toxrisk.eu
For more information on the H2020 programme, visit:
http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/
Press contacts
Prof. Bob van de Water
Division of Toxicology
Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR)
Leiden University
Einsteinweg 55 / P.O. Box 9502 / 2300 RA LEIDEN / The Netherlands
Office: +31-71-5276223 / Secretariat: +31-71-5276270 / E-mail: b.water@lacdr.leidenuniv.nl
Ellen Leinfuss
Chief Marketing Officer
Certara
Office: 609-216-9586
Lisa Osborne
Media Contact
Rana Healthcare Solutions
Office : 206-992-5245 / Email : lisa@ranahealth.com
Email: eu-toxrisk@eurtd.com
Website: www.eu-toxrisk.eu
October 08, 2015
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