24 October 2008

Sheffield spin-out company launches ‘virtual rat’ for drug trials

Source: Financial Times, 22 October 2008

A Sheffield company has launched a “virtual rat” computer programme, which it claims will mimic drug trials on animals.

Simcyp, spun out of Sheffield University, has specialised for the past seven years in creating virtual populations, essentially computer programmes loaded with data about human metabolism that can predict the likely response of people to different drug compounds.

The company’s products, which can be adjusted to mimic different racial groupings, obesity status, or age groups, are used by large pharmaceutical groups including Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline.

While these simulated trials on virtual humans help to refine early-stage drug development projects, no medicine can come to market unless it has been through a number of stages, often beginning in real rats, and moving to dogs or primates before ending in humans.

The Simcyp virtual rat will reduce, though not eliminate, this need for testing on real rats.

“This is like a laboratory rat that exists within a computer,” said Steve Toon, executive director of Simcyp. “With it you can play out all sorts of experimental scenarios in the computer like escalating doses, or giving more than one drug together, without having to resort to [physical] experiments.

“Historically, if you had wanted to answer all those sorts of questions you’d immediately have to go and get some rats out of the animal room and sacrifice them.”

The virtual rat will be available within the next two weeks to Simcyp’s customers, which include 12 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies in the world based on spending on research and development.

“We can’t do toxicological testing of new drugs in humans from the very beginning so there is a need in very early drug development to do some preliminary evaluation of toxicology in the rat,” said Dr Toon.

“We can’t avoid [testing on real rats entirely], but we can now substitute some of the experiments we currently have to do in rats by doing in it in the computer.”