As organ-on-a-chip technology advances at pace, the next step is to connect them and understand a new drug’s effects on the entire human body – without having to go to the trouble of using a real one. And, as James J. Hickman explains, we are getting close… very close.
It’s the Holy Grail of drug development, an Arthurian quest that has thwarted researchers for decades and continues to elude them today: Alzheimer’s Disease.
Despite billions of dollars poured into this quest for a cure, there have been few successful Phase III trials to date. And the cost of these trials pales in comparison to the cost of not finding a cure. There are estimated to be 50 million people in the world with dementia – that’s more than the population of Spain.
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.