‘Gold Standard’ Software Will Help Advance MSU Drug Discovery
By Chuck Carlson
When Michigan State University’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology was chosen to join the prestigious Certara Centers of Academic Excellence last summer, Assistant Professor Adam Lauver knew it was a significant step forward for the school’s burgeoning field of academic drug discovery.
“For us in our department, this is certainly a big deal,” he said. “We’ve never had access to anything like this in the past. I think this is a game-changer for us.”
What Certara brings are state-of-the-art software packages that, Professor Lauver said, offer three major benefits for MSU: training students in drug discovery and development; the ability to measure drug exposure in animals and predict those drug exposures in humans; and using Certara’s tools to not only fuel research but provide the company with ways to improve their tools in the future.
Since gaining access to the software last fall, MSU professors and researchers with deep backgrounds in various stages of drug discovery are getting into the nuts and bolts of what makes the Certara program so valuable and what it can provide for students.
They include Dr. Edmund Ellsworth, Dr. Sing Lee, Dr. Bilal Aleiwi, Dr. Erika Lisabeth, Dr. Lauver, and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Taylor Fiolek and the goal, in the long run, is to study the pharmacokinetics (PK) – or how drugs interact, and for how long they interact, with the body.
“At some point, you have to ask about the impact (of a drug) on the body,” said Dr. Ellsworth, director of MSU’s Medicinal Chemistry Facility and who performs the chemical development of the drugs being developed. “We look at those structures, we figure out the metabolites. Then we go and fix it from a medicinal chemical perspective. Certara is about analyzing those studies. Certara software is considered one of the gold standards in the industry.”
The Certara software then looks at the concentration and duration of the drugs from initial mouse and rat testing so that scientists can develop more effective drugs.
“What we’re hoping to do is be able to model pharmacokinetics of drugs for some of these early programs,” Dr. Lauver. “We’re in the early stages of this.”
Dr. Lee is also involved in the chemical development and sees two benefits to Certara.
“The first is to create better models of how the drug gets metabolized in the body so we can predict the dose and efficacy,” he said. “The second is to work with different molecules to see which ones work better with each other. And will it go to the right organs?”
Professor Lauver, whose research focuses on safety pharmacology, also said the software provides future benefits to students, who will already be schooled on this latest technology that will be vital as they begin their careers in the industry.
“Students who will be training on this will have a jumpstart, which will improve their employability and give them a special set of skills and competencies that most other students wouldn’t have,” he said. “From a training standpoint, it’s huge.”