Summary

The eTOX project partners will develop innovative strategies and novel software tools to better predict the safety and the side-effects of new candidate medicines for patients. Reliable prediction of side-effects in the initial phases of drug development lowers the failure rate in later phases, significantly reduces the number of animal tests needed and accelerates the development of new drugs.

The eTOX scientists will use the complex relationships between the structure of a substance, its metabolism and disposition, and its toxic effects in the body. The combination of this knowledge will enable them to create more reliable computer models to better predict potential side-effects that would otherwise only be discovered in a later stage of the drug development or when the drug is already on the market.

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Achievements & News

eTOX explains ontologies
One of the goals of IMI project eTOX is to predict safety issues in silico (i.e. using computer models) by###learning from companies’ existing preclinical data. The extraction of reports containing this data is now well advanced, raising the issue of standardisation. The question facing eTOX is: how can the project make sure that everybody uses the same term to describe the same thing? The answer lies in ontologies: the description of preferred terms and synonyms to be used in various places, as well as the relationships between the terms. Within eTOX, many ontologies are employed. Some of these are already available in the public domain in order to increase interoperability, while others have been created by the consortium because nothing was available yet. These new ontologies will be released into the public domain and discussed with interested partners (e.g. CDISC and IMI project OpenPhacts). The consortium will also release its annotation software, the first truly collaborative interface dedicated to crowd sourcing of ontology annotations.
(November 2012)

eTOX library goes public
Since its launch in April 2010, IMI toxicology project eTOX has been compiling a vast library of###information and data on the toxicology field. Now the project team has decided to make its eTOX Library available to the public, so that scientists outside eTOX can benefit from it. The library has three sections. Under Articles, the project provides links to relevant journal articles; each reference has a list of keywords and a synopsis highlighting the article’s relevance to eTOX’s goals. The Journals section includes links to journals that cover toxicology issues, and the Links section includes links to public databases, computer modelling tools, projects, and more. For their part, eTOX researchers are using the library to identify new data that can be integrated into the project’s databases, find out about new computational models, and identify potential drug targets and biological markers relevant to toxicity. The library is updated regularly.
(October 2012)

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eTOX makes progress on predictive toxicology
IMI project eTOX is making progress towards its goal of developing a predictive toxicology system called eTOXsys, which is now at the### prototype stage. In a recent article in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, the eTOX partners describe eTOXsys as 'a software tool able to provide useful toxicological risk and hazard assessment.' Users will simply need to enter a small amount of information, such as the structure of the compound they are interested in, and the system will use a series of advanced models to deliver information on the likelihood of potential toxicity of the compound. The system will base its risk assessment on predictive tools built on data held in diverse databases, coming from public sources and, most notably, legacy toxicity reports held by participating pharmaceutical companies, in what constitutes an unprecedented concerted effort at the international level. The data is currently being extracted, formatted and analysed by tools developed by the eTOX project. According to the project team, eTOXsys should significantly improve the quality of the current state of the art when it comes to computational predictions of the toxicity of new drug candidates.
(April 2012)

eTOX SMEs speak out
Four small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) working on IMI’s eTOX project have highlighted the importance of their contribution to the project in a letter### published in Nature Biotechnology. In their letter, the four SMEs note that they all have a proven track record for scientific innovation and possess state of the art technologies that are considered ‘innovative and valuable’ to achieve the project’s goals.The companies state that they: ‘represent an expert ensemble of innovative biochemoinformatics companies and thus offer an optimal complement to the rest of the eTOX consortium that will ensure that novel approaches to predictive toxicology are developed and implemented in an efficient integrated system’. They also note that in their opinion, ‘EFPIA members’ access to SME’s [intellectual property] should not be considered an argument against, or limitation when, applying to an IMI project’.
(October 2011)

eTOX in heart toxicity test breakthrough
Scientists in the IMI project eTOX have developed a computer model to test potential medicines for cardiotoxicity. Currently, many### promising drug candidates fail because they turn out to cause serious heart problems in patients. The new eTOX system should help researchers pick up on these problems earlier on in the drug development process. Users simply have to enter the molecular formula of the compound into the tool, and the system generates a simulated ECG (electrocardiograph). Clinicians routinely use ECGs to diagnose heart problems in their patients; in the same way, users can study the simulated ECG generated by the eTOX system to determine whether or not a compound is toxic to the heart. ‘It provides better results than the currently used computational systems,’ commented eTOX project coordinator Ferran Sanz of Fundació IMIM in Spain. Details of the new tool are published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling.
(May 2011)

Participants

EFPIA

• Novartis Pharma AG, Basel, Switzerland
• AstraZeneca AB, Södertälje, Sweden
• Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, Ingelheim, Germany
• Bayer Schering Pharma AG, Berlin, Germany
• Laboratorios del Dr Esteve, S.A., Barcelona, Spain
• GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development LTD, Brentford, UK
• Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Beerse, Belgium
• UCB Pharma SA, Brussels, Belgium
• H. Lundbeck A/S, Valby, Denmark
• Pfizer Limited, Sandwich, UK
• F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Basel, Switzerland
• Sanofi-Aventis GmbH, Frankfurt, Germany
• Les Laboratoires Servier SA, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Universities, Research Organisations, Public Bodies & Non-profit

• Fundació IMIM, Barcelona, Spain
• Fundación Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
• European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
• Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
• Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
• Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria
• Vereniging voor christelijk hoger onderwijs, wetenschappelijk onderzoek en patiëntenzorg, Amsterdam, The Nederlands
• Lhasa Limited, Leeds, UK

SMEs

• Inte:Ligand GmbH, Vienna, Austria
• Molecular Networks GmbH, Erlangen, Germany
• Chemotargets SL, Barcelona, Spain
• Lead Molecular Design S.L., Sant Cugat del Vallès, Spain