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news.Taconic has established a specialised breeding facility in Edinburgh, the UK. The facility will be used for the development and production of technologically advanced models available to scientists, while creating new jobs locally. The site is viewed as the company's first stage in establishing a strong Taconic presence in Scotland.
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Since 2005, TaconicArtemis, a German subsidiary of Taconic, has been working with its Scottish partner, CXR Biosciences (Dundee, Scotland) to deliver new, commercially viable, models that are more predictive of the pharmacokinetic and toxicological effects of candidate drug compounds and their metabolites in the human body.
The work is supported by the Intermediary Technology Institute, dedicated to life sciences (ITI Life Sciences), which was formed as part of a flagship programme by Scottish Enterprise to help Scotland turn its world-class research in life sciences into commercial successes.
Based on the success of the programme, TaconicArtemis and CXR Biosciences have signed three commercial licences with ITI Life Sciences, to allow them to co-commercialise a range of drug screening models and services developed using these new technologies. More than 40 transgenic strains generated in this program are now included in the companies’ transADMET programme.
The company said that the current preclinical models can be poorly predictive of absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicology (ADMET) in man. This inability to translate animal results to man is driven by profound interspecies differences in the levels and functions of proteins involved in ADMET, and is a major reason for development failure in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
Furthermore, the transADMET programme offers an improved preclinical means of predicting human ADMET response. In each model, key genes have been knocked out or replaced with their human counterparts. This improves the pharmacokinetic and safety assessment of drug candidates by yielding research results that are more predictive of man.
Todd Little, president and CEO of Taconic, said: “Together, Taconic and CXR Biosciences are empowering investigators with sophisticated new tools that can revolutionise drug discovery and provide a strong competitive advantage. Our new transADMET models will enable researchers to advance drug discovery more effectively, minimize the odds of late-stage failure and improve time-to-market with viable new drug therapies.”
Tom Shepherd, CEO of CXR Biosciences, said: “The ground-breaking transADMET models will transform pharmaceutical research and chemical safety assessment by allowing scientists to more closely reflect the human situation in preclinical studies, thereby reducing the likelihood of problems occurring later in clinical trials. The decision by Taconic to locate here to develop this platform with CXR will establish a unique translational research capability in Scotland.”