Cellumen's 2008 collaborations for drug safety/development

Drug safety has never been a more critical, high-profile or costly issue for health care, but now both pharmaceutical companies and consumers can rest assured that the industry is sanctioning a new and more accurate approach to toxicity testing for drug compounds, says Cellumen, a US discovery toxicology company. It is now in collaboration with several leading global organizations such as Eli Lilly, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, to apply its innovative and proven CellCiphr Discovery Toxicology profiling services to the early identification of toxic compounds with unprecedented precision.

Since receiving financing of $8.7 million in July 2007 from Safeguard Scientifics, a provider of growth capital for innovative technology and life sciences companies, Cellumen has secured these collaborations based on the unique Cellular Systems Biology approach used in its CellCiphr profiling services. This treats a cell as an integrated and interacting network of genes, proteins and metabolites that gives rise to normal or abnormal functions. In turn, CellCiphr screens compounds through 10 or more cellular features, instead of just a few features like most existing toxicity assays in the industry. That way, Cellumen can categorize compounds with a Safety Risk Index, giving its customers unparalleled access to mechanisms of toxicity and relative safety risk.

Cellumen's toxicity profiling service may be applied from late primary screening through early preclinical phases, and before entering expensive preclinical testing where the pharmaceutical industry is currently losing significant capital from drugs failing FDA approval due to late identification of safety issues, the firm says. Through CellCiphr, Cellumen's customers have the opportunity to achieve cost savings in excess of tens of millions of dollars a year by accurately identifying and eliminating compounds that result in toxic liabilities.