NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Hamner Institutes for Health Science will collaborate with Entelos on a project that will aim to create a computer model of liver function that will be used to develop biomarkers for drug-induced liver injury, the institute said yesterday.
The work will combine Entelos' PhysioLab biosimulation platform with liver injury and systems biology information developed at The Hamner.
The platform will use information about patients who have experienced DILI into a "dynamic, mathematical model of liver function in virtual human patients" that will use genetic variations as well as other factors, such as age, sex, and behavioral characteristics, to evaluate drug effects.
That platform will guide the development of predictive clinical biomarkers and pre-clinical assays that will help identify patients who are at risk of liver injury due to a response to one drug or a combination of drugs.
Paul Watkins, director of The Hamner - University of North Carolina Center for Drug Safety Sciences, said in a statement that the modeling tool will "create 'virtual patients' that can be used to instantly simulate experiments that could take months or years to perform in living people while greatly reducing the need for animal studies."
"For the first time clinical and preclinical researchers will be able to evaluate the potential effects of a drug on liver function in individual patients and across species in a quantitative manner - prior to exposing patients at risk," said Mikhail Gishizky, Entelos' CSO, said in a statement.