19th Edition - November 2012

Smart SAFE-T strategy spots drug-induced liver injury

IMI project SAFE-T has devised a simple strategy that is able to identify patients with drug-induced liver injury before serious damage has occurred. Writing in the journal PLoS ONE, the project team points out that 1 in 100 hospitalised patients experience liver injury as a result of an adverse drug reaction, but many cases are missed, especially in non-hepatology departments. The SAFE-T scientists used a common indicator of liver damage, namely alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels. Using the SAFE-T strategy, all patients with ALT levels three times higher than the top end of the ‘normal’ range were referred to an experienced hepatologist. The SAFE-T strategy was compared to the hospital’s standard strategy, in which non-hepatologists refer suspected cases of drug induced liver injury (DILI) to experts. The results show that the SAFE-T strategy is much more sensitive, picking up 12 times more cases than the standard strategy and detecting cases of DILI while they are still in the earlier stages. ‘These results therefore strongly suggest that the centralized [SAFE-T] method could prevent very severe complications,’ the researchers write.

IMI-funded scientist wins major neuropsychopharmacology award

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany and a participant in IMI’s NEWMEDS and EU-AIMS projects has been awarded the prestigious ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award 2012 for his groundbreaking work linking genetic variation associated with risk of mental illness to brain structure and function. The award, handed out at the annual congress of the ECNP (European College of Neuropsychopharmacology), recognises innovative and distinguished research achievements in neuropsychopharmacology and related fields. Dr Meyer-Lindenberg’s work focuses on the genetic and environmental risk factors associated with psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia. ‘Especially our recent work on rare, high-risk genetic variants associated with schizophrenia and autism would not have been possible without the cooperative science funded in IMI,’ Dr Meyer-Lindenberg said.

PharmaTrain success – 12 universities, 1 degree!

IMI project PharmaTrain has successfully launched the Cooperative European Medicines Development Course (CEMDC), a postgraduate qualification in medicines development. At a ceremony in Budapest, Hungary on 30 October, high-level representatives of 10 universities signed a Memorandum of Understanding formalising the cooperation, which will allow students to take modules offered jointly by the partner universities. Degrees will be formally awarded by Budapest’s Semmelweis University on behalf of the partner universities. The CEMDC was set up by PharmaTrain to provide a university network that could provide pharmaceutical medicine training in countries where no such education was established. The universities involved in the CEMDC are located in Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey. The initiative therefore gives students from the central and Eastern European and Mediterranean regions the opportunity to benefit from the very best teaching offered jointly by all participating universities. The university network concept was developed because in small countries and countries with small pharmaceutical industries, only a network concept can guarantee long-lasting sustainability of the programme. The course will start in April 2013. ‘This is a quite unique cooperation which could only be organised within the IMI programme and with the active support of the PharmaTrain cooperation,’ commented CEMDC Study Director Sandor Kerpel-Fronius of Semmelweis University.

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.

IMI diabetes projects sign Memorandum of Understanding

IMI currently has three projects working on diabetes – DIRECT, SUMMIT, and IMIDIA – which have a combined budget of just over €100 million. The projects tackle diabetes in different ways. For example, IMIDIA focuses on studying the pancreatic beta cells which are responsible for producing insulin; it aims to use this knowledge develop treatments that can slow down the progress of diabetes. Meanwhile, SUMMIT’s work addresses the urgent need for new treatments to tackle the complications associated with diabetes, such as eye, kidney, and blood vessel problems. Finally, DIRECT takes a personalised medicine approach to diabetes, as it works to identify different varieties of diabetes and effective treatments to tackle them. The projects already work together on an informal basis (as evidenced by their new joint leaflet produced with the support of the IMI Executive Office). However, IMIDIA and SUMMIT have now taken their collaboration to a new level with the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The MoU covers the handling of intellectual property, the transfer of knowledge and materials, and confidentiality. The projects believe that the MoU could serve as a template for collaboration between other IMI projects in the future.

Check out the IMI Education & Training projects’ video

Four of IMI’s Education & Training projects have put together a short video on their activities. In the six-minute clip, the coordinators of the EMTRAIN, SafeSciMET, Eu2P, and PharmaTrain projects present their courses and the benefits they offer for students and course providers alike. The film also features a presentation by IMI Executive Director Michel Goldman.

IMI brain projects in the spotlight in New Orleans

Autism project EU-AIMS held an IMI networking event at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in New Orleans, US, on 16 October. The SfN annual meeting is the world’s biggest gathering of neuroscientists, attracting 30 000 attendees from around the world. The networking event was therefore an excellent opportunity for EU-AIMS to promote its work to the neuroscience community.

NEWMEDS presents results at major psychiatric genetics congress

IMI’s NEWMEDS project presented some of its findings at a symposium held during the 20th World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics (WCPG) in Hamburg, Germany in October. The symposium, entitled Identification and functional consequence of genetic variants conferring risk of psychiatric disease – outcome of NEWMEDS collaboration, featured presentations of NEWMEDS work on how Copy Number Variations (CNVs, in which sections of DNA are present in more or fewer copies than usual) affect intellectual disability, autism, and schizophrenia. The presentations also discussed how NEWMEDS is attempting to model these conditions in mice. The hope is that these studies will shed light on the link between CNVs and the brain and deliver novel and more relevant animal models for research into psychiatric disorders.