Elsevier Joins Forces with Pharmaceutical Industry Leaders to Build New Drug–Drug Interaction Risk Calculator

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES - Sep 11, 2019 - Elsevier, the global information analytics business specializing in science and health, is working together with a set of evaluation partners that include industry leaders such as Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly and Company, Pierre Fabre, Sanofi, Servier, and others to develop a new and improved drug-drug interaction risk calculator (DDIRC). The updated DDIRC will help DMPK (Drug Metabolism-Pharmacokinetic) and clinical pharmacology scientists improve patient safety and outcomes and reduce risk during pharmaceutical development.

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a serious problem worldwide. In Europe, 197,000 deaths per year are attributed to them, while the FDA estimates that over 106,000 people die every year due to ADRs, and, in the U.S. alone, the cost to the medical care system is an estimated $200 billion per year. One reason for this increase in ADRs is the growth in prescription use, especially among aging populations where drug-drug interactions (DDIs) are more likely. Currently, 9% of Americans over age 55 take ten or more drugs, which greatly increases the likelihood of DDIs, and experiencing ADRs. As such, pharmaceutical companies not only have to ensure that their drug is safe for use and effective at treating its primary targets, but they also have to ensure that that same drug is equally safe and effective when interacting with potentially thousands of other drugs-an ever more difficult task.

As DDIRC is a “mechanistic static” modeling calculator, it can be used to predict interactions early on-when information on the drug candidate is limited-through to later stages of drug development. It also allows fast predictions, for quick responses to questions from regulatory bodies or physicians.

"Elsevier’s PharmaPendium team has collected the background data, and the DDIRC can potentially help us put that data to work to broadly understand DDI implications,” said Jessica Rehmel, MS,

Consultant Scientist - ADME/Investigative Drug Disposition, Eli Lilly and Company. "We look forward to quickly evaluating and helping to develop this quantitative risk assessment tool."

This joint project between Elsevier’s PharmaPendium team and a group of leading pharma companies will develop and test, for the first time, a new DDIRC that can analyze both internal and external data. It will include additional models that can, for example, assess the risk of transporter-mediated DDIs or better assess the risk of DDI due to polypharmacy, and will deliver accurate, shareable and actionable insights.

“Because patient safety has always been a priority for Servier, we want to make sure that our drugs are optimally co-administered. Predicting pharmacokinetic Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) with the maximum of relevance, precision and reactivity is therefore essential” declares Yannick Parmentier, Head of the Biopharmaceutical Research Department at Servier. “It starts by anticipating the risk at the research stage, including it in the decision process, to mastering the benefit risk ratio in development phase, optimizing clinical DDI trials as well as following up potential combinations with new drugs appearing on the market in the clinical practice. DDIRC is therefore an essential tool in those perspectives and enables rapid responses, hence decisions, on the interaction risks. In addition, because the tool will be used by a large community of users it will allow also to harmonize the way to predict DDI to the benefit of the patient.”

By enabling pharmaceutical companies to upload internal data, combined with the high-quality, public FDA/EMA data available in PharmaPendium, the new DDIRC will feature increased predictive power.

“The healthcare industry’s ability to treat more and more ailments has enabled people to live longer and more fruitful lives, but with that benefit also comes the grave risk of complications when those drugs interact,” said Guenther Kurapkat, Senior Vice President of Life Science Solutions at Elsevier. “Researchers developing drugs need tools that can take their valuable internal data and cross-reference it against what’s available in public regulatory filings to get a broader view into how their drugs may interact with others. That’s why we are developing this new DDIRC alongside the pharma companies who will depend on it to ensure that key decisions are made with the most predictive insights.

“For Elsevier, this is another important milestone towards a portfolio which helps the Pharmaceutical industry in performing better risk-management. With the power of our new versatile data and analytics platform Entellect™, we enable insights across data assets from customers, 3rd party or any Elsevier’s content in a very flexible and reusable way.”

PharmaPendium’s updated DDIRC will continue to follow the FDA Guidelines for mechanistic static prediction of enzyme-mediated DDI risk and could additionally provide information for other models of DDI prediction, such as transporter-mediated DDI risk, based on Evaluation Partner feedback and feasibility. This increased dataset will allow for more reliable predictions. The new DDIRC is expected to launch in 2020, leveraging the power of our data and analytics platform.