ApPredict

Action Potential Prediction simulator and web portal

The safety pharmacology community is beginning to use mathematical models for the formation of the cardiac action potential to test the likely effect of pharmaceutical candidate drug compounds on the heart. To support this we have developed software to enable non-mathematicians/modellers to perform these simulations to support the CiPA initaitve, and we will aim to ensure this software can perform the solutions that CiPA requires when the requirements are finalised.

ApPredict is a simulation engine, a bolt-on extension to the software package Chaste, to perform simulations of drug-induced changes to the cardiac action potential.

Flowchart of information from ion channel screening informing action potential models.

There are docker containers available to let you run ApPredict (without installing and building it yourself) on dockerhub.

Geoff Williams and Maurice Hendrix have built a web-portal front end for this software, known as ApPortal, so that it can be used easily by the safety pharmacology community. The public web portal can be found at https://cardiac.nottingham.ac.uk/.

A full guide to this web portal has been uploaded to Figshare:
A guide to the Action Potential Prediction “AP-portal” web portal

There is also a dedicated Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods article:
A web portal for in-silico action potential predictions

The portal simulation engine (ApPredict) software is open source, see installation and user guide.

The ApPortal web portal is also itself open source and the software can be found on Github.

The portal has been deployed “in-house” within pharmaceutical company intranets for extra security, where it is also coupled to ion channel screening safety databases to make it easier, quicker and more reliable to use. If you are interested in a consultancy service to perform this process, or to generate predictions specific to your later safety assays, please contact us.

Acknowledgements

The first version of the portal was developed under a Mathematics in Toxicology Strategic Award (NC/K001337/1) to Gary Mirams, by the EPSRC and NC3Rs. Subsequent development has happened under EPSRC Impact Acceleration Awards.