There’s a lot of money at stake when pharmaceutical companies are developing a drug with blockbuster potential. MedeoLinx Inc. wants to improve the odds.
The Indianapolis bioanalytical CRO says its informaticians and medical scientists can accurately predict a drug’s potential and likely success in the approval process, said Dr. Jake Chen, company founder.
Pharmaceutical companies often don’t have the staffing to do the analysis themselves and need an outsourced partner. When they come to MedeoLinx for help, the company draws from a network of experts in applied mathematics, machine learning, bioinformatics, cloud computing, genome technology, and pharmaceutical research and development.
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Each team collects and analyzes the big data in genomics, identifies the drug’s complex target network of inside cells, projects its likelihood of advancing to the clinical trial stage and predicts the drug’s maximum efficacy for treating a disease.
“We help companies when they have challenging drug efficacy and safety modeling problems. We make sense of the data and come up with solutions,” Chen said.
MedeoLinx’s clientele includes one of the Top 10 pharma firms, he said.
Chen is associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is founding director of the Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine and founder of the Discovery Informatics and Computing Laboratory at IUPUI. He has designed GeneChip microarrays at Affymetrix in the Silicon Valley, Calif., and mapping the first draft human protein interactome at Myriad Proteomics Inc.
One of MedeoLinx’s most recent innovations is its drug companion diagnostic biomarker software suites, which combine advanced visual analytics, disease network biology and machine learning. Normal research methodology to identify cancer molecular biomarkers — single proteins or genes that show differential modification — can take 10 to 15 years before obtaining FDA approval, said Steven A. Ramos, MedeoLinx’s chief of operations. In the past 30 years, fewer than 20 cancer protein biomarkers have been accredited by the FDA for clinical use. MedeoLinx’s tool, Ramos said, can help customers discover and validate molecular “ensemble biomarker panels” with both high sensitivity and specificity.
MedeoLinx’s information technology takes advantage of microarray and next-generation sequencing data and cloud-computing-based mathematical signal processing software tools that can accelerate this process, Ramos said.
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The approach helps drug companies come up with predictive models and create molecular profiles for patients. This information can identify patients most likely to respond to a drug and to have side effects from its use. This information, in turn, can help determine a drug’s chances of advancing to the clinical trial stage, Chen said. It also helps with repurposing.
The company also has patent-pending tools to help with “drug repositioning” — finding new uses for old or withdrawn drugs. These tools have generated lots of interest from overseas funds, Ramos said, and that promises to enable scientists at the FDA and drug companies to assess new or repurposed drugs for efficacy and side-effect profiles at the molecular level before extensive clinical trials.
“These tools help them make better go-or-no-go decisions,” Ramos said.
So far, pharmaceuticals — big and small — have been MedeoLinx’s primary focus, but Chen said the company is currently building relationships with insurance companies also.
“They have data that shows clinical pathology tests on patients, and information on drug treatment of those patients, and the long-term outcome of these patients,” Chen said, data that could be very useful in evaluating such things as expanding a drug’s potential success in other therapeutic areas.
Chen is also planning a trip to China to explore the building of a research institution in one of the country’s largest hospitals.
These new approaches to help clientele are a major reason why TechPoint, a statewide advocate for Indiana’s information technology sector, recently named MedeoLinx one of seven finalists in the Health Information Technology Excellence and Innovation category of the 2013 Mira Awards. It is MedeoLinx’s fourth consecutive year as a finalist.
Chen also is a finalist this year for TechPoint’s award for Technology Educator of the Year. Winners will be announced April 20.
MedeoLinx, which has its headquarters at the IUPUI Center for Innovation, won the Innocentive.com 2012 Cancer Systems Biology Grand Challenge. More than 1,000 entries competed to seek series of functional genomic data sets aimed at determining whether cancer could be prevented using an undisclosed drug.
MedeoLinx, which Chen launched in 2006, controls or has applications pending for five patents, and Chen said the company plans to apply for two more patents this year.
