Before a drug can be tested on humans, it has to be tested on animals. The drugs regulators demand it. Nobody – including researchers – likes testing on animals, which is why the race is on to find alternatives.
For this reason – as well as the fact that animal models are often unable to correctly predict how a drug will react in humans – scientists are actively considering alternatives. Fortunately, rapid progress is being made in a number of areas which may soon, hopefully, render animal testing obsolete.
One promising alternative to animal testing is computer models. This “in silico” technique simulates the workings of human biology to predict how a new drug will behave in the body, where it will end up – and even what side effects might occur.
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.