Certara, a provider of biosimulation, today announced that its Simcyp Covid-19 Vaccine Model has won an R&D 100 Award, which recognizes the top 100 'R&D pioneers and their revolutionary ideas in science and technology' in the past year. The model, which is incorporated in Certara’s Vaccine Simulator, has been used by major pharmaceutical companies and allows researchers to study how a vaccine is handled by the human body in computer-generated, virtual populations.
'We are proud and honoured that the R&D 100 Awards judges recognized the important contributions being made by Certara’s biosimulation software during this pandemic,' said Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, PhD, senior vice president of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology at Certara. 'Our Covid-19 Vaccine Model is being used to determine optimal vaccine doses and timing between doses, investigate differences in immune response with age and ethnicity, evaluate the duration of immune response after vaccination, and identify the best booster sequencing for COVID-19 vaccines. We are also now applying our Vaccine Simulator to develop vaccines for oncology and respiratory syncytial virus.'
Certara’s Simcyp Covid-19 Vaccine Model has demonstrated that it can accurately predict the outcomes of actual clinical trials using COVID-19 vaccines. Its prediction that the optimal timing between the first two COVID-19 vaccine doses is eight weeks was validated by the Pitch study conducted at Oxford University. Certara calibrated its model using Covid-19 vaccine structures and validated it by replicating the published clinical data. Furthermore, results from the model have been presented by companies developing COVID-19 vaccines at the American College of Clinical Pharmacy (ACCP) and American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) as well as to global regulatory agencies, including the US FDA.
Established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards program is an annual, worldwide competition held by R&D World magazine that identifies new commercial products, technologies and materials for their technological significance, covering diverse industry sectors. This year’s competition received entries from 17 countries/regions, and they were evaluated by a judging panel that included nearly 40 well-respected industry professionals across the globe.
