Genstruct Inc. has entered into a Master Research Agreement with Pfizer designed to cover current and future collaborations. The first collaboration under this new agreement is in the area of preclinical drug safety, focusing initially on a systems biology analysis of underlying mechanisms of drug-induced liver injury.

"This collaboration is a direct outcome of the success of more than 20 previous research and development projects with Pfizer," said Dr. Keith O. Elliston, president and CEO at Genstruct. "Over the past five years, we have collaborated with Pfizer in the areas of oncology, vascular injury, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disease. This extended relationship with Pfizer provides for the continued application of our systems biology technology to Pfizer's R&D programmes to better predict potential drug toxicities prior to testing of new medicines in humans."

Genstruct's approach reveals the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in drug toxicity as well as in understanding the complete molecular mechanism of action of candidate drugs. This not only defines the underlying mechanism of desired efficacy for a compound class, but also identifies the off-target actions of individual compounds that could produce undesirable side effects, thus allowing rational selection of lead candidates.

"Genstruct's analysis efficiently integrates and makes biological sense out of large scale data such as transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and phosphoproteomic data," commented Dr. Elliston. "In contrast to methods relying on statistics or mathematics, Genstruct queries a proprietary knowledgebase of known cellular signalling pathways, captured in the form of cause-and-effect relationships, with such large datasets. In addition to enabling design of safer drugs, Genstruct's systems biology approach yields mechanism-based biomarkers of efficacy and toxicity of drugs."

Although financial terms were not disclosed, the Master Research Agreement allows Genstruct to retain valuable biomarker intellectual property rights.

Founded in 2002, Genstruct is a biotechnology company focused on elucidating the complexity of biology for the development of successful therapeutics.