Strategic Medicine provides a variety of services to National Healthcare Programs to facilitate a better understanding of disease causation and to determine optimal diagnostic and treatment options.

At present, SMI is working with the Dutch government on a program called ASAT. ASAT is an acronym for alternatives and drug safety to animal testing. The mission of the program is to eliminate animal testing but still maintain high levels of drug safety and toxicology capabilities to assess new drugs or chemicals.

The goal of this program is to improve the efficiency of the animal selection, reduce the number of animals being used or wasted and improve the efficiency and return to the pharma company and the patient.

When we think about personalized medicine, we think about having the right medicine for the right person at the right time. One of the problems is that the way we test medicines and the way we determine the safety profile of medicines is not optimal for translating those studies that are done in animals into human.

SMI is building computational methods to look at how animals behave differently under different conditions and how we can select the better model of an animal for a given test that needs to be administered. With this knowledge, we can not only improve the safety profile of the drug but make sure that the efficacy information gets translated into humans more effectively.