Success in ITI Life Sci program leads to further funding

Scotland's publicly-funded innovation group ITI Life Sciences says it will be extending its research program designed to develop new technologies for use in the pharmaceutical industry to predict the effects of drug compounds in the human body. The research project, which has exceeded expectations in delivering new technologies and intellectual assets (know-how and patents), will be extended from February 4 for up to 14 months and receive a further L2.0 million ($3.9 million) in funding from the group.

The three-year Transgenic Screening and Safety Models (TSM) program was initiated by ITI in February 2005 with L5.5 million. The commercial partners for this are CXR Biosciences (Dundee, Scotland) and TaconicArtemis GmbH (Cologne, Germany).

The technologies developed are transgenic mouse lines, in which key murine proteins responsible for drug metabolism in the cytochrome P450, nuclear receptor (CAR and PXR) and transporter families, have been replaced by their human counterparts. By the end of the initial three-year term, the TSM program had generated 30 novel mouse lines, including the world's first quadruple transgenic mouse, the firm says.