Takeda Joins Lhasa's Effiris Consortium - Powering Model Development Through Privacy-Preserving Data Transfer

LEEDS, England, Sept. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Effiris delivers state-of-the-art secondary pharmacology models, where each model has had the opportunity to learn from the private data of all pharmaceutical collaborators. Lhasa Limited are today pleased to announce that Takeda have joined Lhasa's Effiris consortium of pharmaceutical partners, including GSK and UCB.

The Effiris consortium members work closely with Lhasa to collectively guide and inform the initiative's direction, ensuring that Effiris development remains tightly focussed around accelerating their drug discovery and development pipelines. This pre-competitive forum also facilitates cross-organisation discussion between like-minded collaborators.

Takeda have been members of Lhasa since 2007, sponsoring Lhasa's Derek Nexus and Mirabilis initiatives alongside Effiris.

Lhasa are excited to continue to work with the Effiris consortium through the initiative's second year and beyond, by delivering a growing suite of secondary pharmacology models. Each target model is innovatively trained on the private data of all consortium partners, without any data ever leaving the respective firewalls of the pharmaceutical partners involved.

Lhasa CEO, Chris Barber said "Our members are becoming increasingly dependent upon accurate in silico models in order to make confident decisions faster and more cheaply. For many years, companies have trusted Lhasa with their proprietary data, allowing our scientists to develop models informed by a combined dataset much greater than any held by a single organisation. Effiris is our next step in that journey - combining advanced machine learning techniques with automated learning from proprietary data without exposing any confidential information, allowing us to learn more efficiently from ever-larger volumes of data. We are excited to welcome Takeda into the consortium. This will further improve the accuracy and the chemical space of our models which in turn will help our members better triage and prioritise compounds to synthesize, develop more efficient testing strategies and reduce the risk of downstream failure."

Lhasa's Effiris consortium has expanded quickly since the initiation of the Effiris project in 2019 and remains open to new members. Find out more about Effiris on our website or watch a recording of our recent webinar - 'Building Secondary Pharmacology Models: A Novel Approach to Proprietary Data Transfer'. Alternatively you can get in touch to discuss Effiris further.

About Lhasa Limited

Lhasa Limited is an active, scientific research organisation working to promote the use of computer aided reasoning in chemistry and the life sciences. Our areas of specialisation include the development of software for toxicology and metabolism prediction, and data management. Working closely with Lhasa Limited members and the broader scientific community, Lhasa continues to draw on over 35 years of experience to create user-friendly, state-of-the-art in silico prediction and database systems.

Lhasa Limited was founded on the basis of data and knowledge sharing. Building on its reputation as the eponymous 'honest broker', Lhasa Limited has continued to work on the basis of 'shared knowledge, shared progress' for more than 35 years. Over this time, Lhasa has regularly been trusted with proprietary data and this can be seen in the many successful consortia that we continue to be involved in. The sustained success of such consortia is demonstrative of how working with Lhasa has a positive impact on the research and development process of its members.

Lhasa's products include the Derek Nexus expert system for predicting toxicity, Sarah Nexus, a transparent statistical system for predicting mutagenicity, Vitic for managing chemical data and information, Mirabilis, a tool for assessing the relative purging of mutagenic impurities, Meteor Nexus for predicting metabolic fate, Zeneth for predicting forced degradation pathways and Setaria, a knowledge-searchable database for the storage of toxicity data to manage impurity assessments under ICH M7. More recently, Lhasa Limited has worked with members on the development of Effiris, a secondary pharmacology model suite leveraging value from federated learning, and Kaptis, a tool to support risk assessment in the context of adverse outcome pathways.

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SOURCE Lhasa Limited