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Jordi Mestres, CEO of Chemotargets and coordinator of the Chemogenomics group of the CRIB at the IMIM-UPF research complex (Photo: Daniel Portales, PCB).
 16.01.2018

Chemotargets signs a research collaboration agreement with FDA/CDER

The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (FDA-CDER) and Chemotargets –a spin off from the IMIM Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institut and located at the Barcelona Science Park– will work together under a 5-year Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA). The collaboration aims to enhance CDER’s safety assessments of human pharmaceuticals, supporting the FDA’s mission of protecting public health.

 

The primary objective of the research agreement will be to assess the utility and performance of the Chemotargets CLARITY®, an Intelligence & discovery platform to predict on-target and off-target activities using known pharmacology and safety data from experimental studies of small molecular entities. 

Evaluating in silico models for broad pharmacological profiling is of interest to CDER to predict potential adverse events of drugs in development. Additionally, insight into a chemical’s molecular target profile can help predict abuse and addiction potential, which may reduce risks associated with exposure to these substances.

The collaboration will involve the use of the Chemotargets CLARITY® platform to evaluate hypotheses on the toxicological endpoints that are used by CDER to evaluate drug safety. The program identifies the probable molecular targets and mode of action of small molecules, and their predicted metabolites by simultaneously and rapidly screening in a single predictive model more than 2,000 mechanisms of action associated with therapeutic activity and safety liabilities, including hundreds of safety-related mechanisms annotated with preclinical toxicity and clinical adverse effects.

In this respect, CLARITY® enables predictive compound safety based on careful treatment of FAERS data and the use of some mathematical descriptors to highlight drug safety signals from background noise. CDER will have access to a Chemotargets CLARITY® version based on an expertly-curated training set derived from internal curation efforts and selected patent data from the GOSTAR database produced by Excelra to ensure a comprehensive coverage of the chemical space. Chemical structure drawing capabilities are available and supported via the Chemaxon Marvin JS.

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