NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Cellular Dynamics International today said that its agreement with Roche to substantiate CDI's platform for assessing the potential toxicity of drug candidates for heart disease has progressed to a standard supply agreement.
The two-year agreement, which took effect in March 2009, to substantiate CDI's iCell Cardiomyocytes as a predictive tool was completed early, and the platform will now be incorporated into Roche's drug development decision-making process, CDI said.
The agreement originally was to evaluate the iCell Cardiomyocytes tool against a well-characterized compound reference set in order to test the myocytes' ability to predict drug-induced, potentially life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. Testing involved longitudinal genetic and molecular characterizations of the cardiomyocytes and comparing their performance across established and new testing platforms designed to detect possible cardiotoxic effects of new compounds early in their development cycle.
"We have developed iCell Cardiomyocytes as a cardiac cell model that truly reflects human biology," Robert Palay, chairman and CEO of CDI, said in a statement. "In addition, we have developed a manufacturing process that enables us to reliably deliver the cells in the quantity, quality, and purity that our customers require to successfully accomplish their drug discovery and toxicity testing research."