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GeneGo's ToxHunter Suite Now Available

St. Joseph-based GeneGo this week announced the availability of ToxHunter, the first commercial release of tools and content developed through its industry-FDA MetaTox partnership program.

ToxHunter is a unique comprehensive systems toxicology suite designed for compound safety assessment in chemical and pharmaceutical research and development.

ToxHunter is now available as an add-on to existing licenses of GeneGo's MetaCore and MetaDrug systems biology and systems pharmacology platforms.

ToxHunter includes a unique, detailed ontology of compound-induced pathological observations covering eight target organs in the initial release. This ontology is populated with a comprehensive, manually-curated knowledgebase of toxicant associations to pathology terms along with gene, protein, metabolite biomarkers of chemical toxicity. Content is searchable by pathology, toxicant, or gene, protein & metabolite biomarkers.

ToxHunter enables new experimental analysis and visualization tools such as an exclusive enrichment module for identifying specific gene-pathology associations, a suite of new toxicity-focused pathway maps and QSAR models, and the ability to overlay toxicity biomarker information on maps and interaction networks.

GeneGo's Richard Brennan said the tools will "better support our customers in safety assessment, who are making increased use of existing knowledge in concert with their own molecular data, in a systems approach to understand and predict adverse outcomes of chemical exposure. We will expand the capabilities of the platform in regular future updates, as more of the tools developed by the partnership are released."

Added Julie Bryant, GeneGo's vice president of business development: "Our toxicology customers recognize the value of ToxHunter to their research. The enthusiastic responses to demonstrations of pre-release versions, and strong pre-release sales to government, academic, clinical, and commercial customers validate the partnership program's ability to deliver tools and content with value in the marketplace."

Organizations including Merck-Serono, The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, and the National Toxicology Program of the NIEHS have already licensed ToxHunter under GeneGo's pre-sale program.

GeneGo develops systems biology technology such as compound based pathway analysis, cheminformatics & bioinformatics software for life science research. The original computational MetaDiscovery platform allows an integration and expert analysis of different kinds of experimental data and relevant bioactive chemistry within the framework of curated biological pathways and networks. GeneGo's flagship product, MetaCore 6.3, assists pharmaceutical scientists in the areas of target selection and validation, data mining in biology, identification of biomarkers for disease states and toxicology. The second product, MetaDrug 6.3, is designed for prediction of human metabolism, toxicity and biological effects for novel small molecules compounds.

More at www.genego.com.

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