Simulations Plus Expands Further intoMultibillion-Dollar Drug Discovery Market with Release of...

Business Editors & High-Tech/Health/Medical Writers

LANCASTER, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 28, 2000

Simulations Plus Inc. (OTCBB:SIMU) (www.simulations-plus.com), the leading provider of ADME neural net and absorption simulation software for pharmaceutical discovery and

These versions include a marked expansion in the predictive capability and accuracy of these software products, expanding the company's market with solutions ranging from early discovery through to clinical trials. These solutions have been developed and enhanced to provide for the rapid screening of millions of potential pharmaceutical compounds per year in discovery, and to provide precise modeling of compounds in clinical trials.

In discovery, they can reduce the time and expense involved in synthesizing and performing actual laboratory studies on compounds that are not highly promising new drug candidates. In Phase I trials, they can enable researchers to better understand the absorption characteristics of their compounds, and to design better formulations and reduce failures in clinical trials due to absorption-related issues. The worldwide drug discovery research market is estimated at $13.9 billion (PhRMA).

GastroPlus(TM) was originally released in 1998. Its earlier versions were designed to predict the absorption of oral medications in human beings in a fasted state. The program has now been extended to include absorption predictions for rat and dog, as well as humans in the fed state.

In addition, GastroPlus(TM) also now incorporates a pH-dependent chemical degradation model to handle compounds that chemically degrade in the gastrointestinal tract. The expansion from modeling only in human to including modeling absorption in rat and dog allows pharmaceutical scientists to perform these vital analyses on animal data, which are available much earlier than human data in the drug discovery process.

For example, scientists from Simulations Plus have now demonstrated that a model developed for absorption of a controlled release preparation of theophylline in dog can be used to predict the behavior of that same dosage form in humans. Development of this new software has the potential to reduce the overall number of animals that are needed in the drug development process. Many convenience features and increased user-friendliness have also been added.