Utrecht and Innsbruck; December 2021 – PD-value, a leading translational pharmacometrics service company, joined MESI-STRAT, a project funded by European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme. MESI-STRAT aims to develop metabolic and signaling pathway models in Estrogen Receptor positive (ER+) Breast Cancer (BC) to ensure effective patient stratification in the clinic. PD-value joins the consortium to enhance the impact of these models via customizing and commercializing the models for drug development purposes. The partnership is an excellent example of academic and industry collaborations between PD-value, who has unique applicationbased experiences with a strong network within the pharmaceutical industry and 14 academic, medical and commercial consortium members with state-of-the-art and cutting edge-scientific research in metabolic and signaling experimentation and modeling of cancer.
PD-value diversified into the systems biology field in late 2020 by investing in SysBioSim, a former commercial member of the MESI-STRAT consortium from 2018, and replacing the company in the consortium. The Director, Jeroen Elassaiss-Schaap, of the rapidly growing company, comments, “I am excited about joining the MESI-STRAT consortium. I believe our expertise in pharmacometrics, PK-PD and commercial systems biology and quantitative systems pharmacology is a fantastic match with the rest of the consortium. We are thrilled to collaborate with highly esteemed and brilliant scientists under the MESI-STRAT umbrella. We love that we can keep cutting edge through our academic collaboration. I foresee great impact coming out of this consortium, not only through creating commercial value via supporting breast cancer drug development but a huge social impact through better therapies for breast cancer patients and better patient stratification in the clinic. I anticipate that MESI-STRAT will improve the lives of breast cancer patients and their families, and we cannot be happier to play a role in it.’
“Breast Cancer is highly prevalent among women’ adds Prof. Kathrin Thedieck from the University of Innsbruck, the Coordinator of the MESI-STRAT project. ‘There is a need for new therapies and better patient stratification for certain patient groups. We observe drug resistance in some 30% of patients upon successful treatment with existing therapies. As a consortium, we aim to understand and decode this phenomenon and ultimately improve the patients’ lives. Our research is very multifaceted. We want the findings of our research and our clinical work to have a medical and commercial impact. Our ground-breaking results can have applications towards breast cancer drug development, and we couldn’t have a better partner than PD-value to expand the impact of our results in the pharmaceutical sector. Our consortium is thus extremely happy to collaborate with the PD-value team. Their unique set of capabilities, their approach and motivation to translate our research to application are a great asset to our endeavor.”
About PD-value
PD-Value B.V. is an SME in the field of translational pharmacometrics founded in 2014 by Jeroen Elassaiss-Schaap, a recognized senior scientist in pharmacometrics with almost 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. The organization has its office in the Utrecht Science Park. Since 2016, PD-value has a sister company, Gedmore B.V., specializing in the automation of pharmacometric modeling using an integrated database and web application. In 2019, the company decided to include mathematical modeling and systems biology simulation services in its portfolio by engaging in SysBioSim B.V., previously one of MESI-STRAT partners. PD-Value employed the key personnel of SysBioSim as of 01.01.2021 and integrated the expertise in the field of systems biology and network in the pharmaceutical and health & food ingredient industries. The integrated services include performing predictive analysis via writing mathematical models of signaling and metabolic pathways and running simulations, development of specifically designed models and simulations for clients to answer their research questions based on existing literature and proprietary client data and analysis on the efficacy, efficiency, dosage, and adverse events of drug candidates. The services and expertise of PD-value, strengthened with systems biology services, present enormous value to the clients by reducing the required time and monetary investment via helping them better design their R&D programs, animal and clinical studies, and accelerate their decision making.
About the MESI-STRAT Consortium
MESI-STRAT is a 57 months project (funding volume 5.95 million Euros) coordinated by Prof. Kathrin Thedieck at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (UIBK). Dr. Tobias Anzeneder from the German patient organization PATH Biobank is the MESI-STRAT co-coordinator.
Fifteen partners from seven European countries contribute to MESI-STRAT: jointly with modelers and experimentalists at the University of Newcastle, UK (Dr. Daryl Shanley) and the Charite in Berlin, Germany (Prof. Christine Sers), work at the UIBK (Prof. Kathrin Thedieck) focuses on oncogenic signaling through the mTOR and MAPK networks. Experimentalists and modelers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Dr. Christiane Opitz), the University of Bergen, Norway (Prof. Mathias Ziegler), the University of Tromso, Norway (Prof. Ines Heiland), the University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands (Dr. Barbara Bakker), and Neuroimmun GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany (Dr. Karl-Heinz Kellner) focus on metabolic networks centered on tryptophan and NAD metabolism. Model and data management and analyses are conducted by HITS gGMBH, Heidelberg (PD Dr. Wolfgang Müller) and the University of Bergen (Dr. Sushma Grellscheid). PD-value B.V. (Dr. Jeroen Elassaiss-Schaap and Basak Tektemur-Altay) in Utrecht, The Netherlands customizes our models for the pharma sector and coordinate the commercial activities. Our computational models are developed, individualized, and validated based on patient-derived in vitro and in vivo models from Dr. Violeta Serra (Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain) and Prof. Benoit van den Eynde (De Duve Institute, Brussels, Belgium), and patient samples from clinical trials within and associated with MESI-STRAT. The MESI-STRAT clinical trials are coordinated by the clinician-scientist Dr. Christiane Opitz (DKFZ), and conducted by PATH Biobank (Dr. Tobias Anzeneder) and the Medical University Innsbruck (OA Dr. Daniel Egle) with support from the University Hospital Heidelberg (Dr. Steffen Luntz).