Due to the rising costs in drug discovery and development and a large proportion of drug failure being associated with absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion-toxicity (ADME-Tox) issues, the market for ADME-Tox technologies is witnessing a robust growth. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are adopting new technologies and ADME-Tox screening at an early stage of drug discovery and development to avoid such failures.

SimuGen, winner of BioSpectrum Asia Pacific Bioscience Industry Emerging Company of the Year Award (see selection criteria), has been operating in Kuala Lumpur since 2008 and focuses on predicting human toxicity in drug discovery process.

Dr Brian O'Keeffe, while working as senior vice-president of Malaysian Biotechnology Corporation, realized the need for accurately predicting toxicity in early stages of drug discovery. Since the issue was not adequately addressed by current toxicogenomics, he set up SimuGen, a computational biology company, in Europe in 2006 and then expanded it to Malaysia for the Asian region.

The company combines traditional, genomic, high content (HCS) in vitro screening and traditional cell endpoints to produce high throughput screens for use alongside other early ADME testing. Currently, it offers comprehensive toxicology screening services (HT-X) and high-throughput decision analytics software (HT-Stream) for customers' drug programs.

With more than 20 years of experience in research program management in developing and testing pharmaceuticals, the team at SimuGen is currently working with established partner companies.