SysBioSim, a systems biology simulations and bio-modeling company, and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research center for mathematics and computer science, have announced a new partnership focusing on the improvement of drug development for Kidney Fibrosis. The partnership will merge SysBioSim’s strong signaling and metabolic pathway modeling as well as simulation capabilities with CWI’s existing cell-based modeling techniques. SysBioSim and CWI aim to support pharmaceutical companies in developing more reliable and efficient drugs against kidney fibrosis.
SysBioSim CEO Basak Tektemur Altay comments “We are very excited about entering a collaboration with CWI to further develop our ground-breaking technologies and capabilities. We trust this collaboration will yield in the technologies that will improve the lives of millions of kidney patients. Kidneys are crucial as regulatory organs. According to the EMA reports, renal diseases are devastating and have a major impact on public health. Scientists estimate renal diseases to reach pandemic proportions over the next few decades. Together with CWI, our aim is to develop computational modeling and simulation based solutions to improve the drug development process for renal diseases starting with kidney fibrosis. I trust our unique approach and combination of capabilities in this collaboration is the key to developing a platform that pharmaceutical companies can directly use and patients can benefit from very quickly, despite, in general, the lengthy drug development process.”
“Kidney failure, including fibrosis, is prevalent as a primary disease, but it is also a common side-effect of long-term pharmaceutical treatment,” adds CWI Senior Researcher and Leiden University professor Roeland Merks. ”CWI’s multi-scale modeling strategies will help predict how pharmacologically active compounds can change the structure of kidney tissues in a potentially harmful way. Rather than focusing on individual molecules and pathways, we also model the dynamics of tissue remodeling, thus helping to unravel the effect of a pharmaceutical on the whole tissue. This innovative aspect makes multi-scale models a key interest to public health and the pharmaceutical industry. I believe our collaboration with SysBioSim will contribute to the development of these much needed new strategies.”
Personal page Roeland Merks (CWI)
