GNS, Biogen Idec Identify RA Drug Targets

GNS Healthcare and Biogen Idec published results from a study focused on identifying novel drug targets for the one-third of rheumatoid arthritis patients who do not respond to leading anti-TNF therapies.

The study resulted in an experimental and computational approach for researchers to integrate clinical, molecular and genetic data into models of disease progression and drug response. This approach helped predict individual patients’ clinical responses to the shutting down of specific pathways, suggesting that accurate determinations can be made about patients’ responses to existing drugs as well as the inhibition of novel targets and pathways based on DNA and gene expression data from a given patient’s blood.

The researchers used GNS’ supercomputer-driven REFS (reverse-engineering and forward-simulation) scientific computing platform to construct a comprehensive disease model directly from the raw data. This computer disease model enabled the team to conduct virtual clinical trials, simulating the clinical effect of inhibiting various drug targets and predicting novel and previously known alternative genetic targets to anti-TNFs.

“This project established that a relatively small, heterogeneous clinical trial dataset could be directly used to learn novel disease biology if one has access to a significantly powerful computational modeling platform. This is the first time that a patient-data driven, computer model of rheumatoid arthritis has been developed to generate patient-specific predictions to the response to existing drugs and the response to inhibiting novel targets and pathways of the disease,” said Colin Hill, chief executive officer and co-founder of GNS Healthcare.