RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – February 19, 2014 – The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences (The Hamner) has announced that Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development & Commercialization, Inc. (OPDC) has agreed to become the newest member of The DILI-sim Initiative. Established in 2007, OPDC is a part of the Japan-based Otsuka Group (Otsuka) responsible for the research and clinical development of healthcare products. Otsuka becomes the twelfth member of the DILI-sim consortium, joining current members Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Research & Development, LLC, Merck, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, Pfizer and Sanofi.

ABOUT THE DILI-SIM INITATIVE

The DILI-sim Initiative, 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. 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 DILIsym^® software to be a routinely used component of the pharmaceutical industry’s preclinical safety toolbox by 2014.