It’s long been known that better early prediction of drug-like compound properties overcomes costly drug attrition later. But prediction is stuck in the dark ages. In this essay from the last decade, Dr. Malcolm Young entertainingly likens the potential of good prediction to the very old success story of bridge building.
Bridges used to be built without knowing how they would behave and corrections made as properties and problems revealed themselves during construction. Later, engineering and computer simulation made it possible to predict exactly how they would behave before a single stone was turned.
But that was physics. What of chemistry and biology? Dr. Young waxes poetic about the potential of systems biology and modeling of complex systems. But that theme seems as old as time by now: biology and chemistry get more and more complicated the more we try to codify them. Still, we managed to make improvements in weather prediction didn’t we?. . .Well, lets not go there.
The motivation is certainly strong. Predicting drug attrition could not possibly have more value. Where such a strong motivation exists, history has shown the problem eventually buckles to ingenuity and the availability of new technologies and data. Now Genecentrix enables one of those leaps forward by innovative leveraging of tissue-specific genomic data. Check out it out here.