IOMICS Announces Advanced Software to Identify Chemical Hazards

CAMBRIDGE, MA - Oct 5, 2016 -  

IOMICS today announced the release of its first vertical product, FUSION STS, a new class of chemical analytics that will allow scientists and chemical engineers to rapidly build and deploy in silico HTS systems that can be used stand-alone or to augment in vitro screening initiatives.

“If you want a healthier planet we need to shift our thinking away from only downstream regulatory testing to much earlier and continuous toxicity screening for all product development initiatives,” said J. Gormley, CTO and senior software architect at IOMICS. “Our expectations for safer products are much higher today than they were just a decade ago. Part of the continuing problem, however, is the product development paradigm itself. Chemists and chemical engineers have unintentionally designed products with inherent safety problems due to the lack of reference data and analytical tools to model and characterize a broad range of chemical hazards within food, packaging materials, cosmetics, pesticides, and more recently, nanomaterials. Consumers have expected downstream regulatory testing, with all of its inadequacies, to keep us safe for a given level of exposure. That approach to chemical testing will continue to allow potentially dangerous products into the marketplace. We believe the solution is to apply safe-design practices continuously and much earlier in the product development cycle.”

FUSION STS promotes safer consumer product design through early and continuous in silico toxicity screening and rational chemical design. FUSION STS utilizes multiple cheminformatics techniques and advanced machine learning to characterize biochemical activity and structural patterns that are inherently toxic or may later permit hazards to form from heat, chemical exposure, or other stressors. FUSION STS provides multiple chemical, omic, and assay data sets along with automated model building to predict reduced toxicity potential, provide evidence reporting, and even recommend alternative structures for consideration. All of these features are seamlessly integrated in IOMICS’s high-performance cloud servers and accessed directly from your browser with minimal learning time and no coding. Once a custom screening model is developed, chemicals can be assessed in real time directly from FUSION STS’s chemical editor or easily integrated into established HTS initiatives.

“We are excited by the initial reviews coming from early adopters. We believe FUSION STS will reshape the future of green chemical design, accelerated drug development, and safer food production,” said Dan Corkill, Ph.D., computer scientist and senior adviser at IOMICS. “To be clear, FUSION STS goes beyond read-across methods, application-specific QSAR models, and open source analytics tools with respect to data staging, model development, evidence generation, and mechanistic interpretation. FUSION STS is the first QSTR system to allow the chemist or chemical engineer to automate safety monitoring and do it from the earliest stages of a project.”

Tom Zisk, Technical Lead on the software product, notes: “I’ve been asked what is FUSION STS's most significant contribution to the emerging field of systems toxicology, and more specifically in silico screening. It is FUSION's ability to simultaneously explore chemical space and develop a series of matching toxicity models in real time across a range of species, targets, and endpoints. No other analytical tool today has this capability.”

"We are enthusiastic about the potential of FUSION STS to rapidly screen for bioactivity in plant natural products," said Professors Jennifer Normanly and Sergey Savinov of the University of Massachusetts Amherst BioFoundry Consortium for the Discovery and Synthesis of Bioactive Natural Products. "We are initiating an HTS pilot with IOMICS this fall to model the behavior of extracts from one of the largest known collections of plant cell cultures. Our aim is to identify new antimicrobial compounds relevant to human health and U.S. Agriculture."

"We believe continuous in silico based safety screening should be the foundation of every researcher's strategy, and when used in concert with in vitro testing, will increase information yield while reducing R&D costs," said Gormley. "In addition, in silico screening technologies may soon challenge and improve upon many animal-based testing procedures. Reducing animal use is consistent with the evolving recommendations from REACH and more recently the EPA and the FDA regarding alternative testing approaches. In collaboration with our corporate partners we are accelerating toward an era of low-cost continuous toxicity screening for a broad range of products and endpoints without the need for animal models."

"ChemAxon has been pleased to provide supporting tools for the FUSION Analytics Platform," said Eufrozina Hoffmann, Product Owner of Marvin, ChemAxon's chemical drawing suite. "We believe that software products like FUSION STS are the future of life science informatics.”

ABOUT IOMICS:

The IOMICS Corporation is an innovative analytics company based in Cambridge Massachusetts. IOMICS believes the freedom to explore new ideas and rapidly deploy advanced analytics is essential to accelerating science, designing safer consumer products, and improving healthcare. Its mission is to put advanced decision models to work everywhere - in the lab, in the clinic, and in the environment. IOMICS encourages collaborations to create new products and services for chemical engineering, medical research, and clinical care.

To learn more about the FUSION Analytics Platform, or to become an application development partner, visit us at http://www.iomics.us