SMART Award

Physiomics receives SMART award

Oxford-based Physiomics plc announces it has received a SMART award for work into the feasibility of developing a Rational Therapy Design system.

When developing new pharmaceuticals, particularly new cancer therapies, initial success in the laboratory often ends in puzzling and very expensive failure in the clinic. The high failure rate slows the development of successful new therapies and wastes over half the money spent by both cancer charities and the pharmaceutical industry on new drug development.

The Physiomics Rational Therapy Design System uses advanced mathematical and software techniques to create accurate representations of what really happens to cancer cells inside a patient as they receive therapy.

Physiomics was created in 2001 to develop this technology and make it available to pharmaceutical companies and cancer charities on a global basis. It is located on the Oxford Science Park and has strong links to Oxford Brookes University through its Science Director, Professor David Fell. The Company also develops simulations in call signaling and cell death and does work related to diabetes and insulin.

“The SMART award has enabled us to progress rapidly with the Rational Therapy Design system. Because of this, Physiomics is in discussion with a number of major Pharmaceutical companies and has signed its first contract. Without the DTI support, we would have been unable to develop and globally commercialize this innovative technology.” said Dr John Savin, Executive Director.

The project is ahead of schedule and is showing some interesting and novel ways in which cancer therapies could be delivered. Although these need to be validated by laboratory work, they would not have been discovered by the standard pharmaceutical discovery process. By capturing the latest biological and human genome data into the cancer growth simulations used, the time and cost of developing new cancer therapies should be dramatically reduced.