Abstract

An ongoing challenge facing the pharmaceutical industry is to reduce drug attrition in the clinic. The biggest causes of failures in the clinic are attributed to a lack of efficacy and safety issues. There is an urgent need to develop human cellular models that are better able to predict whether a drug will work in the clinic and identify possible side effects. The advent of new models and technologies including organoids, organs-on-a-chip and microphysiological systems have the potential to revolutionise drug discovery, provided we have a good understanding of what the models are, or are not, fit for purpose for.
Full characterisation is important, in order to qualify the models for what they represent with respect to healthy and diseased human tissue physiology and function. We have developed sets of criteria to score models against in order to select the most appropriate model to address the question being asked. For any one given target, different cellular models may be required to progress the target through from validation to candidate selection. This talk will include examples of the new generation of models and the stages of drug discovery that these are being applied to.