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European Biopharmaceutical Review
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| Matthew Segall at the ADMET Division, BioFocus DPI, explores the balance between luck and judgement in drug discovery
Estimates for average costs and durations vary, but a reasonable approximation puts the typical duration for bringing a drug to market at 12-15 years (1) and the average cost at over $800 million (2). The reason for this is that the process is dominated by failure, with a high attrition rate of compounds and projects, even in the later and most expensive clinical phases. Therefore, the majority of the cost is associated with compounds and projects that never result in a marketed drug.
Pharmaceutical R&D is conventionally divided into three phases, as illustrated in Figure 1. Although the exact definitions of these phases may vary and the boundaries are blurred, they may broadly be described as; target discovery, drug discovery and drug development. In this article, we focus on the drug discovery phase for small molecule drugs – those with a molecular weight less than around 800Da. DRUG DISCOVERY VERSUS DRUG DESIGN
It is interesting to note that the middle phase is termed drug discovery, which suggests a search for a solution among many possibilities and with a certain element of speculation. This is in contrast to a design process, which implies a rational process by which a small number of optimal solutions are constructed ab initio. The high attrition rates of the current state-of-the-art suggest that drug discovery has not yet become drug design. Why is this, given recent industry trends that have emphasised techniques such as ‘rational drug design’ (3), ‘structure-based drug design’ (4), and ‘de novo drug design’ (5)? |
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News and Press Releases |
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3P Biopharmaceuticals initiates partnership with American Biotech Zhittya for Parkinson’s disease treatment
3P and Zhittya began their relationship at the beginning of 2019
with 3P being selected as the CDMO to transfer the process for scaling
up and performing cGMP manufacturing for clinical studies. After
successfully achieving transfer of the process, 3P anticipates
manufacturing of the first cGMP batch by the second quarter of 2020.
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Case Study: Cmed’s Mobile Data Management Solution
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The trial presented to Cmed was a randomized, double blinded, placebo
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results of this study were submitted to the FDA and approval granted
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Industry Events |
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12th World Meeting on Pharmaceutics, Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology
8-11 February 2021, Vienna, Austria
In continuation of the very successful scientific meetings in Budapest, Paris, Berlin, Florence, Geneva, Barcelona, Malta, Istanbul, Lisbon, Glasgow and Granada, the 12th PBP World will be held in Vienna from 8-11 Feb 2021. This every two year held conference has gained an ever increasing impact among the pharmaceutical scientists: With up to 1000 submitted abstracts and about 1300 participants it has become a well-established major meeting, attracting scientists from all over the world.
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