Drug Safety Assessment
The field of safety toxicology is entering a new era shaped by the burden of evaluating the ever growing number and diversity of chemical entities for their impact on the environment and human health. The need for establishing an efficient R&D strategy to obtain critical information on the possible drugs and chemicals toxic effects at an early stage of development is further influenced by the associated costs, time and the extensive animal experimentation that traditional risk assessment requires.
PerkinElmer's Contract Research Services primary approach to these issues is to continuously develop highly relevant in vitro measurements that can not only serve as a first line estimate of a compound’s potential toxicity, but also provide insight into possible mechanisms of that toxicity. PerkinElmer's Contract Research Services’ suite of drug safety assessment panels, in silico data analysis programs and scientific consultative approach provide meaningful pharmacology data with increased prediction of in vivo toxicology effects.
PerkinElmer has been partnering with the EPA’s ToxCast program since 2007 bringing its in vitro pharmacology offering and scientific expertise in building and interpreting a predictive toxicology database. Our over 20 years experience in conducting drug/chemical safety pharmacology studies along with our expertise in creating and mining SED Select™; PerkinElmer's in silico database with information on approximately 2,300 known bioactive compounds screened in 90 different in vitro assays and our off-the-shelf offering of over 1,000 optimized in vitro assays have proved extremely useful to develop relevant predictive in vitro assay panels and to screen more than 1,000 compounds through nearly 300 targets. Predictive in vitro toxicology data provide the basis for fast and economical triage of new and existing chemical entities before more extensive animal studies. We have demonstrated that biological signatures composed of readouts from several relevant assays can be derived from this dataset for specific adverse outcomes. This approach can also provide a means to explore biological mechanisms and pathways central to a compound’s toxicity and suggest ways to ameliorate those effects. In fact, the data from ToxCast has already revealed unsuspected target effects associated with observed chemical toxicity in vivo (Toxicology, Vol. 282 (1-2): 1-15, 28 March 2011).
Please contact us to discuss your drug safety/toxicology assessment approach and define the most appropriate predictive panel of binding and functional assays for your research.