Non-profit research institute announces the release of the latest versions of its flagship DILI platform and its accompanying sister platform focused on mitochondrial function

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences (www.thehamner.org) announces the release of DILIsym® v3A and MITOsym™ v2A. DILIsym® and MITOsym™ software are developed and released as part of the DILI-sim Initiative (www.dilisym.com), an effort to develop a mathematical, mechanistic model of drug-induced liver injury chaired by Dr. Paul B. Watkins. DILIsym® v3A and MITOsym™ v2A were made available to all DILI-sim Initiative industry members as of March 6, 2014.

DILIsym® v3A includes several key additions and upgrades, such as a new mechanistic representation of bile acid effects on mitochondrial function, an enhanced innate immune model, and parameters relevant for several additional xenobiotics, among other features. An expanded set of SimPops™ population samples relevant to mitochondrial dysfunction and bile acid homeostasis is also included.

MITOsym™ is a mathematical model similar to DILIsym®, executed in MATLAB with code and graphical interface versions provided. Unlike DILIsym®, MITOsym™ is a model of mitochondrial function in the in vitro setting, designed to help with parameter identification and data interpretation from experiments conducted to infer mitochondrial function in hepatocytes using the Seahorse Bioscience XF Analyzer machines. Ideally, experiments are run on the XF Analyzer machine, data is interpreted and parameters identified with MITOsym™, and those parameters are then fed into DILIsym® for predictions of in vivo hepatotoxicity risk. MITOsym™ v2A includes new parameters specifically optimized for primary human hepatocyte experiments, in addition to the parameters related to HepG2 cells included in version 1A.

ABOUT THE DILI-SIM INITIATIVE

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 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. For more information, please visit www.dilisym.com.

ABOUT THE HAMNER INSTITUTES FOR HEALTH SCIENCES

The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences is a nonprofit translational biomedical research institute located on an open, multidisciplinary campus in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Building upon 35 years of research excellence in toxicology, The Hamner works on drug and chemical safety in collaboration with academic, corporate and government partners. Novel technologies used at The Hamner include genomic and bioinformatic approaches for improving toxicity testing, in silico models for predictive toxicology, in vitro models that utilize human cells or cell lines to evaluate perturbations of cellular responses, and in vivo models to elucidate genes that play a role in susceptibility to drug-induced toxicities. For more information, please visit www.thehamner.org.