Drug Toxicity

Reduce Late-stage Failures

BG Medicine offers a unique systems pharmacology and systems toxicology approach to understanding drug-induced toxicity, and answering fundamental questions about mechanism, inter-species applicability, subtle differences within a drug class and the role of underlying disease, predisposition or concomitant medications.

Systems toxicology can often quickly answer the question whether the toxic effect is intrinsic or extrinsic to the desired pharmacologic effect - a question that has fundamental implications for the class of agents.

Second Generation Compound Selection

Compare biochemical fingerprints of “good” drugs and “bad” drugs to see which of your candidate compounds has the best opportunity for success.

Accessible Biomarkers

In situations where preclinical tests are inconclusive, but the unmet medical need for the compound is high, body fluids may represent the only practical source of biomarkers for monitoring drug safety.

Toxicity Mechanism

Understanding the mechanistic causes of toxicity are important for drug development decisions. Through our proprietary Correlation Network Analysis, BG Medicine can help explain the biological mechanisms by integrating and interpreting the relationships between transcripts, proteins and metabolites.

Drug Rescue/Salvage

BG Medicine can provide mechanistic understanding of true toxicological effects and monitoring biomarkers of these effects to support further development of important compounds. Take that old compound of the shelf and understand “why” it caused ALT elevation in animals. A deeper understanding of the biochemical effects can provide opportunities to design drugs without the unwanted effects or combine therapies to alleviate or remediate the effect.

Toxicology Example: A cross-compartment Correlation Network™ spanning plasma and hepatic tissue, and comprising proteins, metabolites and nucleic acids. The drug under study exhibited certain hepatotoxic histopathology, however conventional markers in circulation such as transaminases were not altered. BG Medicine identified a number of circulating lipids which were specifically correlated to proteins involved in the drug-induced hepatotoxicity, and further was able to elucidate key hepatic mechanisms induced by this compound that dysregulated critical biochemical pathways and led to the observed pathology. All correlations shown are significant at p<0.01.