Some years ago, Pfizer scientists theorized that a drug that partially blocked nicotine receptors in the brain would be an effective treatment for helping smokers to quit. The rationale was straightforward. Such a drug could bind to the receptors like nicotine but it wouldn’t fully activate the receptor. As a result, the new drug would reduce craving and withdrawal symptoms when quitting, as well as block reinforcing effects if one did try to smoke a cigarette.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.