Drug discovery –challenges in the years to come

Get those costs down! This is now the paramount objective when it comes to the search for new drugs. Nor is this sur-prising, with average development costs of EUR 800 million per drug. The real question is not why but how, and specific answers are hard to come by. “Pharma 2010; Silicon Reality“, the latest report on this subject by IBM Business Consulting Services, concludes that in the years to come, it should indeed be possible to get development costs for a new drug down to some 200 million dollars, while at the same time cutting average development times from the current 12–14 years to just three to five years. If this vision were to become a reality, then it would be nothing short of a revolution.

That the IBM analysts believe IT will have a decisive role to play in this optimization process doubtless comes as no surprise. The use of IT, so they argue, will also enable pharmaceutical producers to develop focused methods of treatment for patients with specific diseases. The report identifies several measures that pharmaceutical companies can adopt in pursuit of these goals. These include the use of cutting-edge hardware such as Petaflop, Grid Computing and modern memory technologies, all of which enhance computer performance and hence promote progress in research too. Predictive biosimulation – the use of computer models to simulate biological systems – reduces the number of laboratory experiments required, while “in silico“ modelling enables researchers to also predict the impact of pharmaceuticals on the human body and hence their effectiveness and safety. Processanalysis technology will enable pharmaceutical companies to monitor their manufacturing processes continuously, automatically and in real time, thus rendering random sampling and end-of-pipe quality controls superfluous. The analysts’ conclusion is one I can wholeheartedly sign on – namely, that drug development must be tackled holistically

-Marc Platthaus-