Simulations Plus, Inc. (NASDAQ: SLP), a leading provider of consulting services and software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, today announced that it has expanded its product portfolio with the release of version 1.0 of its MembranePlus™ simulation software.
Mr. John DiBella, vice president for marketing and sales of Simulations Plus, said, “Simulations Plus continues to expand its product line with frequent release enhancements of our existing line of software products, and now the release of MembranePlus 1.0, our first completely new software product since DDDPlus™ was released about 10 years ago. This new software program is expected to appeal to a wide audience of pharmaceutical companies who use in vitro measurements of molecule permeabilities to estimate the likely permeability in preclinical species as well as humans.”
James Mullin, product manager for MembranePlus and member of the simulation technologies team in Simulations Plus, added, “Thanks to our associates from Absorption Systems, LLC, in Exton, PA, we were provided with the detailed experimental data from permeability measurements for more than 40 drugs in Caco-2 cell experiments, which enabled us to calibrate and validate the simulation model in MembranePlus. We believe MembranePlus is a unique, science-based simulation that will provide valuable insight into the results of in vitro permeability experiments to guide researchers to better project decisions.”
Dr. Viera Lukacova, team leader for simulation technologies in Simulations Plus, said: “The pharmaceutical industry uses a limited variety of laboratory experiments using cell cultures and artificial membranes to try to determine how well new molecules will be absorbed into cells in the gastrointestinal tract of animals and humans. Unfortunately, the results of such experiments for the same molecules can vary widely across different laboratories. These differences are entirely caused by changes in experimental setups, but have not been easily understood because of the number of factors involved and the complexity of the interactions among them. By developing MembranePlus, we can provide a cellular simulation model to account for how measured permeabilities are affected by a variety of factors in the experimental conditions and how to interpret the results of experiments from different laboratories. In addition, MembranePlus will provide a tool to interpret in vitro data for substrates of cell membrane transporters and to derive appropriate inputs for binding affinity constants to be used in the GastroPlus™ in vivo simulations.”