Certara’s Simcyp Covid-19 vaccine model has won an R&D 100 Award, which recognises the top 100 “R&D pioneers and their revolutionary ideas in science and technology” during the year.
The model 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.
Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, Senior Cice President of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology at Certara, said: “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.”
The 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.
Image credit: Johan Extra
