Strand Life in ties with Pharmidex

Bangalore-based Strand Life Sciences, a company focussed on developing technologies for drug discovery and development, has entered into a collaboration with Pharmidex. Pharmidex assesses the ability of compounds to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

According to Kas Subramanian, chief scientific officer of Strand Life Sciences, both companies focus on providing solutions to facilitate the discovery and development of new medicines.

Under the collaborative agreement, both Strand and Pharmidex will promote each others' existing offerings and will jointly develop new software to predict the ability of compounds to cross the BBB.

"This effectively combines the in-silico expertise of Strand with the BBB-focussed offering of Pharmidex, which includes in-vitro, ex-vivo and in-vivo methodologies, he added.

The present software models to predict BBB penetration are not well developed by a consistent set of experimental data, which means that their use is limited.

"CNS is a challenging area and the collaboration gives us access to data that can be used to build good predictive models," said Subramanian. He also added that they will build predictive models for BBB based on in-vitro and ex-vivo data generated by Pharmidex.

"This will also help expand our pre-built ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion) model suite in our product admetis (in-silico modelling and predicting drug-relevant ADME)," he added.

According to Mohammad Alavijeh, chief scientific officer of Pharmidex, "By providing a consistent set of data, we will work with Strand to produce the best software package to predict the ability of compounds to cross the BBB."

"The new software will have an immense value for all companies engaged in CNS (central nervous system) drug discovery and also helps non-CNS drug discovery, where knowledge that compounds do not cross the BBB reduces the likelihood that lead compounds will be associated with CNS side-effects," he added.