Instem receives grant, enters consortium to mitigate late stage risks

08-Jul-2019 - Last updated on 21-Aug-2019 at 20:03 GMT

(Image: Getty/ipopba)

Notocord, an Instem company, will provide data acquisition and analysis services to a research and innovation program to improve risk prediction of cardiovascular adverse events.

Notocord Group, a part of the IT solutions company Instem, will work with 10 industry and academic beneficiaries in a consortium as part of the three-year program INSPIRE: Innovation in Safety Pharmacology for Integrated cardiovascular safety assessment.

The consortium includes pharmaceutical companies, universities, as well as software and hardware suppliers, and is funded in part by a $4.5m grant agreement with the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

The software solutions provider, Notocord, will supply data acquisition and analysis services for preclinical studies, as part of the program, and will receive $564,000 (€500,000) from the grant.

The program will build on technological advances to improve the assessment of drug-induced cardiovascular toxicity and looks to create safer medications with fewer cardiovascular adverse events.

A spokesperson for Instem told us that drug-induced arrhythmia is one of the most common causes and costly areas of drug development failure, and the initiative is a potential regulatory driver for evolving technology in the field.

According to the spokesperson, while working on the INSPIRE project, Instem will also be collaborating with other consortium members on two sub-projects: An in silicio modeling program using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to asses risks surrounding the use of human-induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, and the data acquisition of physiological signals and animal positioning to reduce animal usage.

Data from these signals will enable researchers to combine cardiovascular and neurobehavioral assessments during telemetry studies to reduce the use of animals in studies and better estimate drug effects, a spokesperson told us.

Additionally, with this grant, Notocord will be able to fund and supervise two early-stage research projects that use its Notocord-Sense platform. The cloud-based collaboration platform enables secure data sharing across prototype and deploy new analysis modules.