Open Competition 3 - Information Technology

A Distributed ChemTox Platform for Predicting Chemically Induced Toxicity

Sponsor: LeadScope, Inc.

• Project Performance Period: 5/1/2004 - 4/30/2006
• Total project (est.): $2,180,466.00
• Requested ATP funds: $2,000,000.00

The cost of developing and bringing a single pharmaceutical drug to market now exceeds $800 million. One driver of this high cost is the fact that many candidates fail on the basis of safety issues during later stages of the development process after significant amounts of money already have been spent to bring the compound to the point of animal or even human testing. The ability to predict toxicity early in the discovery process would increase success rates in the production of new drugs and other chemical products, while also reducing attrition costs and animal experimentation. Leadscope plans a three-year project to develop a technology platform that will extract information from heterogeneous toxicology databases and use it to predict accurately the toxicity of new compounds by applying statistical methods and a knowledge-based model. The project will remedy the lack of large volumes of high quality data to use in building predictive models. Leadscope will develop a new standard for the transfer and storage of toxicity information, ToxML (an XML standard for toxicology content), to enable the integration of data from any public or proprietary database. The new platform also will include tools for standardizing, managing, and mining data and building prediction models. The company will create a collaborative distributed workspace and develop controlled vocabularies and other technologies to translate, integrate, and transform disparate data sets into a network of data sources for data mining. The open platform will include a dynamic prediction model builder so the chemical space in the training set can be augmented easily. There is high risk involved in developing a real-time predictive model and in merging chemical and toxicity information while maintaining data structural integrity. ATP funding will significantly accelerate the research and is needed because an open platform is not an attractive investment for private funding sources. If successfully developed, the new technology would improve drug safety and health care overall, accelerate R&D and regulatory approval by improving decision making, and increase productivity in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Improvements in clinical success rates could save tens of millions of dollars in development costs per new drug.

For project information:

Glenn Myatt, (614) 675-3731
gmyatt@leadscope.com

ATP Project Manager

Jack Boudreaux, (301) 975-3560
jack.boudreaux@nist.gov