The DILI-sim Initiative and the DILIsym® Model
The DILI-sim Initiative is a pre-competitive partnership between The Hamner and a diverse set of stakeholders to develop a computational model that will predict whether new drug candidates will cause drug-induced liver injury (DILI) in patients. The goals of the Initiative are to improve patient safety, reduce the need for animal testing, and reduce the costs and time necessary to develop new drugs. It is the intent of the DILI-sim Initiative to make the model, in the form of DILIsym® software, broadly available so that it may be used by the pharmaceutical industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other entities in academia, government and industry.
The Initiative is led by Dr. Paul B. Watkins, Director of the Hamner-University of North Carolina Institute for Drug Safety Sciences, located on the campus of The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences in the heart of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The goal for the DILI-sim Initiative is for the DILIsym® model to be a routinely used component of the pharmaceutical industry’s preclinical safety toolbox by 2014.
