IMI eTOXsys

The eTOX project brings together partners interested in developing innovative strategies and novel software tools to better predict the safety and the side-effects of new candidate medicines at an early stage. Reliable prediction of side-effects in the initial phases of drug development lowers the failure rate in later phases, significantly reduces the number of animal tests needed and accelerates the development of new drugs.

This project addresses the complex relationships between the structure of a substance, its metabolism and disposition, and its toxic effects in the body. By combining this knowledge it is possible to create more reliable computer models to better predict potential side-effects that would otherwise only be discovered in a later stage of the drug development or when the drug is already on the market.

The eTOX project brings together experts in toxicology, knowledge management, bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, biostatistics and software development from industry and academia. To overcome the lack of publicly available toxicological data of chemicals which are potential drugs, the team share and jointly exploit the archived results of more than 10,000 toxicological studies of the industry partners. This data, which was previously only accessible to the owning pharmaceutical companies, is being integrated with publicly available data (e.g. from ChEMBL, RepDose and biomedical literature) in a new database, IMI eTOXsys.

See also Norecopa's collection of links to alternatives databases