Articles

Research is moving away from the widespread High Throughput Screening (HTS) approach to a more selective subset or expansion screening, which conserves valuable compounds and means screening campaigns are proving more successful as leaner, more efficient libraries are screened against the target. Read more

Last month, long-awaited draft guidance from the Food and Drug Administration was published titled Drug Interaction Studies - Study Design, Data Analysis, Implications for Dosing and Labeling Recommendations. Read more

Research commissioned by Pharma IQ found more than four-fifths said the main issue they experience when integrating sample information and discovery data was merging physical data and that gained through automation. Read more

Virtual R&D improves the certainty that drugs invested in will eventually make it to market, allowing pharmaceutical companies to reap back with investment on R&D. However, the move to virtual R&D will result in what PwC describes as a more "challenging and demanding landscape" in which third-party collaborative efforts on R&D will emerge as the norm. Read more

Poorly soluble candidates now account for 60 percent of drugs in the pipeline, and as technologies become more complex, the figure continues to increase. Read more

Further drivers include decentralisation via personalised sequencing platforms that will make the technology available to individual laboratories and increased reagent usage on the current high throughput platforms installed base. Read more

It costs millions to get a drug from conception to development stages, as well as several years of research. However, a key challenge in the pharmaceutical industry is that scientists can put all this work and money into a compound, only to find it has unacceptable toxicology and they have to return to the drawing board. Indeed, the most recent figures suggest the cost of discovering and developing a drug is hundreds of millions of pounds. Read more

Research into drug transporters forms an increasingly important part of the non-clinical development phase, with new fields such as pharmacogenomics offering new approaches to an area that is increasingly under the microscope of regulatory agencies. Read more

The main challenge that the industry faces then is whether the solubility of drugs delivered orally can be improved to negate the negatives of this method as, being the least expensive and most widely accepted method, it makes the most business sense in the current economic climate. Read more

Predictive toxicology works by giving research and development teams key insights into the toxicological effect of the drug or pharmaceutical compound in the early stages of development, meaning that companies can work towards improving the issues or identifying the cause, ensuring that no costly surprises take place during the clinical trials. Read more

Compounds are now routinely screened to explore the solid state of drugs at an early stage of development, as well as suggest any storage specifications that may be necessary to avoid the development of new polymorphs in transit. Read more