Virtual Drug Development

Drug R&D is technologically challenging, capital intensive and largely driven by market incentives. Although the market system has generated many innovative therapies, it cannot cater for diseases for which commercial incentives are insufficient to trigger private sector investments in R&D. Development and delivery of medicines for many diseases face significant challenges, including cost, safety, stability, formulation and resistance. Low returns on investment combined with high developmental risks discourage business from engaging in this type of research.

The emergence of new technologies, lower the research productivity within the integrated company, and patent expirations have encouraged the pharmaceutical company to adopt a network structure. The network structure is changing the traditional pharmaceutical value chain as pharmaceutical companies work on the basis of alliances and other partnership models including outsourcing.These days, computers are an integral part of genomics-based drug discovery, helping researchers find drug targets by comparing databases of genomic information with annotations about functional information, by analyzing the data that comes in from various wet lab experiments, and by simply keeping track of the huge amounts of biological data being unearthed in life sciences research. This is the role of bioinformatics, a field that has exploded in importance over the last few years as companies have begun to realize they are drowning in raw data.
The uses of computers for other parts of the discovery and development process are coming to the fore. Researchers can now test virtual drug compounds against virtual protein targets, study the virtual pharmacokinetics of their optimized virtual lead in what amounts to virtual animals, study its effects on virtual organs, design a virtual clinical trial to test assumptions and variances, and even answer some regulatory questions through simulation.

Somewhere in that process, a chemist has to actually mix up a compound and conduct some experiment but buckets of silicon are being added to the discovery and development process every day, with the hope that the wet lab will one day become as dry as a sand box.We can, of course, correlate certain polymorphisms with likely disease outcomes, and we learn more every day.

The more we learn about the importance of these new variables, the more we have to take into consideration when developing clinical strategies, undertaking drug development, and designing clinical trials. And gene sequence, even when linked to functional information, will only be one of many variables to consider in optimally designing therapeutic interventions and treating disease. 

www.iptonline.com/articles/public/IPTSEVEN94NP.pdf 

http://www.tballiance.org/newscenter/view-innews.php?id=515

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/8/07-045690/en/index.html 

http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/tdrnews/pdf/news77.pdf