Immunetrics Inc. has entered into an agreement with Eli Lilly & Co. in the application of in silico modelling technology to clinical trial design.

The specific application, which was not disclosed, involves the adaptation of existing Immunetrics models of inflammation for the identification of novel biomarkers and the development of design parameters for relevant human studies.

The collaboration represents an additional demonstration of interest by the pharmaceutical industry in using modelling approaches to supplement statistical analysis in study design. Critical Care Medicine has previously called in silico modelling "a method coming of age," enabling investigators to optimize trial design outcomes by modelling an extremely large number of possible trials involving a large number of variables.

Immunetrics has demonstrated the utility of dynamical models in experimental design of a number of complex clinical settings, including trauma, haemorrhage, shock, sepsis, coronary artery bypass and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The company is also developing models of use in cancer immunology and in the prediction of adverse drug reactions in chronic inflammation.

Immunetrics is a Pittsburgh-based biosimulation company providing a platform to model complex biological systems.