Faster than a speeding toxicity

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Toxicogenomics company Iconix Biosciences announced last month it is co-developing, along with Santa Clara, Calif.-based microarray company Affymetrix, a toxicogenomics solution that improves research­ers' understanding of safety issues associated with new drug candidates and other com­pounds.

Dubbed the ToxFX Analysis Suite, the new offering combines Iconix's automated analysis capabilities with Affymetrix's GeneChip arrays, provid­ing detailed information on a drug candidate's toxicological liabilities and pharmacological properties. This will reportedly help scientists prioritize drug candidates and make preclini­cal development decisions faster than ever before.

Just how fast? According to Dr. Kurt Jarnagin, vice president of new technology for Iconix, experiments on drug candi­dates that would have generated toxicogenomics data in a matter of weeks or months can now be com­pleted within a few days.

The ToxFX Analysis Suite can do this in part because it offers the "distilled toxicogenomic experi­ence" of scientists at Iconix and puts data in context with the com­pany's DrugMatrix reference data set, notes Dr. Don Halbert, execu­tive vice president of research and development at Iconix. "We have consistently heard from the toxi­cology community that analysis of the data is the single largest bar­rier to applying toxicogenomics as a standard screening tool in drug development programs," he adds.

"Drug discovery scientists are going to be able to get information that they couldn't get before, in a very affordable manner," Jarnagin says. "They are going to be able to look at candidate compounds and...compare those to compounds that they understand well. They will now be able to give reports to project teams with immediately actionable items."

The new offering will "rev­olutionize the drug development process" by not only accelerating research but also improving the quality of drug candidates, pre­dicts Chip Leveille, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Business Unit at Affymetrix.