Drug Discovery
The challenge
In the intricate landscape of drug development, pharmaceutical companies grapple with the complexity of swiftly advancing potential drugs through their pipeline.
The first hurdle for a new drug is ensuring that the preclinical candidate has the optimal properties for success, including pharmacology, metabolism and pharmacokinetic and in vitro safety profiling. The added complexity of achieving this through inhalation can pose many additional challenges.
Our solutions are designed to precisely address these pivotal checkpoints in human and lung-relevant in vitro systems, offering pharmaceutical companies insights that not only expedite the drug development process but also elevate the chances of clinical success.
Our solutions
ImmuONE provides drug screening services, allowing compounds to be screened for toxicity, safety or inflammatory responses in the airways. We can assess toxicity in all regions of the airways, including the alveolus and the immune cells (alveolar macrophages). We perform a variety of biological assays and provide expert analyses to help achieve your drug discovery goals. We tailor our assays and help you to design experiments that address your specific needs. Our unique cell painting assays (such as morph_ONE) provide clarity on the human health impact of your products.
Models like ImmuPHAGE™ and ImmuLUNG™ are ideal, cost-effective and human-relevant solutions. Our models provide reliable and reproducible representations of alveolar macrophages in the human airways, reducing reliance on animal testing. When applied in conventional screening assessments and together with our cell painting assays, these models support early identification of species differences (rats, humans) in alveolar macrophage responses to support better interpretation of in vivo studies and de-risk drug candidate selection.
Pharmacokinetics & pharmacodynamics
ImmuONE can both perform and support the design of bespoke pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic assays. These assays can be used to investigate the effect lung cells have on the drug/substance that they are exposed to and the effects the drug or substance exert on the lung cells.
Our expertise includes:
- Permeability assessment of a drug/substance across the epithelial barrier and determination of mechanism of uptake/efflux (passive, active, transporter-driven)
- Distribution assessment of a compound, assessment of uptake concentrations and localisation in epithelial cells and alveolar macrophages
- Metabolism assessment through depletion of parent compound and presence of known metabolites
- Assessment of the effects of the compound on the biological system (efficacy and toxicology) using a range of commercially available in-house 2D and 3D models.
Case study
A pharmaceutical company reached out to ImmuONE, searching for a high-throughput model to predict lung-relevant inflammatory reactions upon inhalation of their panel of drugs. Their challenge was twofold. They were seeking a solution that was not only endpoint agnostic, but also robust enough to discern whether inhaled compounds were likely to be safe or might trigger adverse reactions, as seen in in vivo studies.
After in-depth discussions with the company to understand their specific needs, we embarked on an exploratory journey using our novel multiparameter high-content image analysis approach. Our primary objective was to determine if our method had the potential to predict the safety of their inhaled compounds, especially focusing on its ability to predict any adverse inflammatory effects. By employing this advanced technique, we aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the potential risks and benefits associated with their inhaled modalities.
This study demonstrated that our multiparameter HCIA tool had the ability to distinguish alveolar macrophage responses in vitro to compounds with different safety profiles. By clearly differentiating between compounds that were safe for inhalation and those posing potential risks, our approach empowered the company to make more informed, timely decisions, thereby streamlining their development process and ensuring a higher degree of safety and reliability.