Immuno-oncology (IO) Simulator in Certara IQ™

Introducing Certara IQ, an AI enabled modeling platform for scaling and democratizing QSP modeling. Certara IQ offers a range of model libraries, licensed separately, spanning numerous pharmacologies and therapeutic areas.

In this video, we are joined by Andrzej Kierzek, Certara’s computational systems biologist who has led the development of the QSP platforms for immuno oncology, immunogenicity and vaccines. Hi Andrzej.

Hi Jessica.

We’re focusing today on the immuno oncology simulator or the IO simulator. Can you tell us more about what this is?

Yes, of course. So IO simulator is a mechanistic model of biology underlying cancer immunity cycle in solid tumor. In a typical application, the user develops a model describing mode of action of their drug and connects this model to established model of the interaction between cancer and immune system. Extensive biological scope of IO Simulator then allows incorporation of important sources of patient variability, such as immune cell composition of a tumor, which determines immunologically hot and cold tubers, just to give one example. IO simulator is used for virtual trial simulations where impact of a drug on tumor volume and other biomarkers is simulated in patient population.

What would you say is the most important application of the IO simulator?

Oncology is all about combining available therapies to give individual patient best chance of being cured. And as the consequence of this, that the most important application of IO Bulator is prediction of combination therapy efficacy. Our platform includes most frequently used modalities, such as anti PD-one or anti CTLA-four, discalibrated for most frequently used compounds.

So when user develops the model representing action of their drug and connects their model to the platform, they can then simulate how the drug would perform in combination with the standard therapies. Now predictive simulation of combination therapy in individual patients necessitates very wide biological scope. The model must include all mechanistic steps linking different targets and patient baseline variables. IO simulator provides such a legacy model of underlying biology, and it would be impossible to develop such an extensive model within timelines of a specific project.

Thank you. And finally, what is the benefit of using the IO simulator within Certara IQ?

So Certara IQ provides software environment which facilitates understanding and extension of large QSP models and also facilitates execution of complex calibration execution workflows. In that way, CertaraIQ democratizes application of QSP platform for groups not having extensive QSP resources. The user friendly model editor with modular biological process map interface helps to expand very complex IO simulator model without the need of dealing with very large model code directly. Some basic simulations can also be run through that interface.

At the same time, users with even basic coding skills in Python can access model programmatically and implement complex computational workflows. The coding is favored democratized by AI code generating tool, so you can describe your task in words and receive a code. Python is also a popular data science environment, so it provides standard libraries which can be used for analysis of simulation results and presentation in slides, reports and publication.

And then last but not least, everything that I’ve just described is run off on affordable high performance computing cloud and operated through web browser without the need for complex software installations and updates.

Thank you, Andre.

Thank you very much for having me.

Certara IQ is a tool that offers simplified, scalable QSP model building to deliver robust predictions and insights to accelerate your drug development. To learn more about Certara IQ, Visit our website.