CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
9 July 2007
Implementation Investments
Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Reduces Drug Discovery Time with SimBiology
The MathWorks tm announced that Merrimack Pharmaceuticals is using SimBiology ® to streamline the research and development of therapeutics to treat autoimmune disease and cancer.
SimBiology plays an integral role in Merrimack's discovery platform, Network Biology , which is multidisciplinary, integrating computational tools from engineering and high throughput biology to rationally guide drug design and development. By using SimBiology, Merrimack has further improved collaboration across the various components of the drug development process, enabled better analysis and simulation of drug candidates, and may significantly reduce the time required for drug discovery and development.
Network Biology seeks to understand the system dynamics that govern protein networks - the functional set of proteins that regulate cellular decisions. SimBiology, the industry's first graphical systems biology tool, is an essential piece of the modeling technology in Network Biology. It is used by Merrimack researchers to simulate, model, and analyze the biochemical pathways in cancer and other diseases, enabling researchers to make more informed decisions throughout the entire drug discovery, development, and commercialization process.
"In order to compete in an industry dominated by large pharmaceutical companies with larger research efforts, we've adopted a unique approach to drug discovery that incorporates the principles of Model-Based Design," said Birgit Schoeberl, director of Network Biology at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals. "SimBiology and other MathWorks tools have been instrumental in giving us the competitive edge we need, delivering a combination of powerful mathematics and an easy-to-use graphical interface that makes it easy to create and share models of pathways with other teams throughout each stage of research and development."
"The MathWorks tools have increased the speed with which we can identify drug candidates," continued Schoeberl. "For example, a group of six researchers were able to create seven candidates in less than three years with SimBiology. That would've taken a lot more time without using modeling or by using multiple tools from other companies, and it would have required that we learn three or four different software packages."
Researchers can also use SimBiology to simulate the pathway and the systems reaction to inhibitors. Once the best inhibitor is identified, Merrimack's computational biologists and researchers work in combination to produce drug candidates for preclinical testing. In addition to SimBiology, Merrimack used the Bioinformatics Toolbox to identify critical signal transmission pathways.
"The MathWorks is committed to providing powerful and easy-to-use tools to help innovative companies like Merrimack improve the speed and quality of their research efforts," said Kristen Zannella, marketing manager for biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical at The MathWorks. "In particular, the rapidly growing field of systems biology, in which Merrimack is an innovator, is fraught with complexity that must be mitigated with technology such as SimBiology, which combines a drag-and-drop interface with the proven mathematical capabilities of MATLAB ® . We look forward to working with Merrimack as they continue to broaden their use of SimBiology and other MathWorks tools, which will help them introduce even greater time and cost savings into their drug development process."
Currently, MathWorks tools are being used solely by the computational modelers. However, over the next year, use of MathWorks tools such as MATLAB and SimBiology will be expanded to Merrimack's experimentalists.
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