The higher you climb, the harder you fall
Getting pharmaceutical research right at the
preclinical stage saves time and money by highlighting
problems early in the process. Pharmatest believes
that choosing the right preclinical partner can
help make your preclinical tests more predictive,
and ultimately cut down on attrition.
If you trip and fall when jumping off a rock,
you will probably
only get bruised. However, if you fall down a
mountainside,
you are much more likely to crash and burn. The
same
principle applies to drug discovery; preclinical
attrition is less
painful than clinical. If your lead candidate
is bound to fail, the
sooner it happens, the better.
All of us who are working in the field of pharmaceutical
research
probably agree that reducing attrition is one
of the key challenges
that drug discovery is facing these days. At the
very least we need
to find ways to shift whatever attrition is inevitable
towards the
early stages of drug discovery. The past years
have also seen
tremendous streamlining and rightsizing of R&D
operations
throughout the entire pharmaceutical industry.
Unfortunately,
pharmaceutical research does not work on homeopathic
principles.
You cannot keep cutting the research resources
and expect higher
throughput and higher quality of results. You
can stretch for a
while, but if you keep stretching long enough
or hard enough you
will wear your resources so thin that sooner or
later something has
got to give. In the long run you can expect a
dramatic drop in both
quality and quantity of research.
Taken separately, these two issues – the
need to cut attrition and
the constant pressure to cut costs separately
– can easily appear as
problems or threats. However, there is a way to
turn these threats
into an opportunity. Choosing the right preclinical
partner will both
increase the predictiveness of your research and
help you manage
and reduce your strategic costs.
Never fear, help is near
This last decade has witnessed the rise of
a new type of contract research organisation,
the preclinical CRO. These companies are often
small, flexible and highly specialised, which
enables them to keep abreast of the latest developments
in their area of expertise, and apply this knowledge
in their service selection. This allows them to
invest significant resources in a narrow niche
of research and in turn develop specialised services
and disease models whose commercial availability
is, at best, limited. In an outsourcing market
dominated by a few large service providers, these
small specialised CROs step in to fill the gaps
left by the big players who mainly focus on providing
bulk services.
These preclinical CROs are a welcome solution
to the discovery
and R&D departments of many pharmaceutical
and biotech
companies. By outsourcing their preclinical efficacy
research and
lead validation they can control and reduce fixed
research costs
without sacrificing performance. That, if anything,
is called killing
two birds with one stone. Validating and maintaining
the speciality
methods and models these small CROs offer would
often be
impractical and cost-prohibitive for a pharmaceutical
company.
Pack the right gear
Everyone knows not to go hiking in high heels.
In this sense, life in the lab is not that far
from life in the outdoors. Proper equipment guarantees
best results. In the lab this means the latest
translational methods. However, it is extremely
hard – if not impossible – to maintain
the latest models for your preclinical research
if your R&D department is constantly under
pressure to keep fixed costs at a minimum. Yet
predictive methods are an absolute must before
any drug candidate can make its way to the shelves
of a local pharmacy.
Cancer drug discovery is an excellent example
of this. Cancer and
its progression is a complex process of physiological
events and their
consequences. Nevertheless, the preclinical efficacy
of many new
cancer drug candidates is still being tested with
less-than-optimal
methods, such as primary tumour models alone.
Could this perhaps
be one reason why so many of these candidates
fail in clinical trials?
Medical professionals worldwide are beginning
to accept that
in many cases cancer should be categorised as
a chronic disease
that cannot be cured, but which can be controlled.
Almost invariably
this includes inhibiting the ability of malignant
cancerous cells
to develop metastasis to distant sites. The only
reliable and
predictive way to achieve this is to equip your
drug discovery
with preclinical models that provide adequate
clinical resemblance
to the clinical setting.
If we wish to reduce attrition in clinical trials,
we need to pay
more attention to the tools used for preclinical
research. This is
where the preclinical niche CROs, such as Pharmatest
Services
can help. They often focus on a narrow field of
expertise and provide
highly specialised services and disease models
that are designed
specifically for diseases with unmet clinical
needs. Pharmatest,
for instance, specialises in preclinical lead
validation services in
disease areas with unmet clinical needs. Its services
include
such speciality models as cancer metastasis models
and orthotopic
cancer models, as well as models for musculoskeletal
diseases,
urology and inflammation.
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