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In Vivo Safety

Standard and custom-built in vivo studies to help you identify potential safety liabilities early and de-risk your potential drug candidates.
  • Quick study starts and speedy data delivery to enable fast, informed, decision-making

  • Access to a range of experts to design and conduct your in vivo safety studies and interpret the data in context

  • Align in vivo discovery safety with pharmacology and DMPK, for an integrated approach with integrated thinking and analysis

Assessing potential safety liability early

Essential to optimizing drug design and progression into non-clinical development is assessment of safety with understanding of therapeutic related aspects such as DMPK. This requires timely and integrated approaches to understand and, as needed, address potential inherent target or compound related issues.

Creating a solid foundation to enable further development

In early discovery, where decisions need to be made quickly to enable rapid progress, often on limited budgets, quality data that can be relied on is key to create the foundation for success. Working with a partner that can help you by doing the right study to answer the right question is key.  

Innovative modalities need innovative approaches

Whether your therapeutic is a based on an established large or small molecule platform, is a complex medicine, or an advanced therapy technology; assessing relevant potential safety vulnerability is essential to translation of brilliant science into an impactful therapy. Our scientists, our models and our depth of experience provide clients at the cutting edge, with the right resource to support them.

If it’s exploring a known target-related liability or investigating an unexpected finding that you need, we have a range of studies that can be performed to de-risk your compound and help keep it moving to the next stage.
 

Early Safety

  • Rodent single- and multi-dose safety studies
    • Flexibility to customize endpoints (necropsy, histopathology, bioanalysis, biomarkers)
  • Dose escalation and pilot studies in large animals
  • Toxicokinetic studies in small animals and large animals
  • Safety endpoints in pharmacology/disease models

CNS liability investigations

  • Seizure risk: EEG telemetry in rodent and large animal, sleep scoring option
  • General neurofunction: modified Irwin screen, locomotor activity
  • Convulsion risk (electrical/chemical induced)
  • Memory/learning: Morris water maze, nest building
  • Motor coordination: Rotarod, beam walking, catalepsy, nest building
  • Anxiety: Elevated plus maze, light/dark box, marble burying, nestlet shredding
  • 5HT2A activation: Head-twitch response
  • Sleeping time
  • Cannabinoid tetrad test
  • Drug abuse liability and addiction

Cardiovascular

  • Echocardiography (rodent and large animal)
  • Rodent telemetry (blood pressure, ECG, LV contractility, body temp, activity)
  • Large animal telemetry with left ventricular pressure (LV contractility) in addition to ECG and BP
  • Continuous noninvasive glucose monitoring (Libre)

Gastrointestinal studies

  • Charcoal transit/propulsion
  • Gastric damage
  • Emesis 
  • Gastric secretion

Renal endpoints

  • Urine volume, electrolytes, protein, pH

Respiratory

  • Intrapleural pressure (IPP) model for airway resistance and compliance assessment 

Endocrine studies

  • Hershberger assay
  • Uterotrophic assay (ovariectomised model)

Explore more Drug Discovery capabilities or browse common capabilities in our catalog.

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