Over the last 20 years, the landscape of drug discovery has changed dramatically. Historically, research and development took place within large pharmaceutical companies with a collection of smaller biotechnology companies doing the innovating, and eventually being acquired by larger companies. However, given the ever-increasing drive to deliver value quickly and more cost-effectively, the environment is now filled with a dynamic mixture of large pharma, biotechs and virtual organizations.
The timelines for delivery of a candidate compound, irrespective of the therapeutic area, has consistently averaged between two and a half and four years from the initial hit identification effort (see image above). The number of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals is lower today compared to 1996, which has led to an increased quest for better validation of targets, and higher quality candidates with a greater chance of success.
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.