Biomarkers - the future of medicine
Biomarkers - the future of medicine?
Biomarkers look set to become a vital part of drug development in the future, promising a far more efficient means of finding new treatments for a huge range of diseases and conditions.
Despite the sophistication of modern drug development techniques, finding effective new medicines is still quite a hit and miss process. Currently, there are far more misses than hits: it is estimated that only 8% of drugs that enter phase 1 trials will eventually gain regulatory approval.
Many drugs fail at a late stage in the testing process, which means that a great deal of time, money and expertise is wasted before the research is finally abandoned. Drug development costs are spiralling, having risen by 50% between 2002 and 2007.
At the root of these problems is the difficulty of predicting - and predicting early - which drug candidates will be clinically effective and which will not. New potential drugs currently have their performance measured through clinical outcomes, an approach that is imprecise, laborious and in many ways outdated.
The field of biomarkers could hold a solution to many of these problems. Biomarkers are blood-based tests, gene sequences or mutations, mRNA expression profiles or tissue proteins that can be used to provide evidence of the state of an organism. They are objective and measurable indicators of a biological process or condition.
Biomarkers have the potential to revolutionise medicine, allowing doctors to tailor treatment regimes to individual patients, with drugs designed to treat specific people and not the general population, as is currently the case. Although in its infancy, biomarker research looks set to have a huge positive impact on the ways in which we combat disease.
biomarkers: http://www.biomarkercenter.com/
Biomarkers look set to become a vital part of drug development in the future, promising a far more efficient means of finding new treatments for a huge range of diseases and conditions.
Despite the sophistication of modern drug development techniques, finding effective new medicines is still quite a hit and miss process. Currently, there are far more misses than hits: it is estimated that only 8% of drugs that enter phase 1 trials will eventually gain regulatory approval.
Many drugs fail at a late stage in the testing process, which means that a great deal of time, money and expertise is wasted before the research is finally abandoned. Drug development costs are spiralling, having risen by 50% between 2002 and 2007.
At the root of these problems is the difficulty of predicting - and predicting early - which drug candidates will be clinically effective and which will not. New potential drugs currently have their performance measured through clinical outcomes, an approach that is imprecise, laborious and in many ways outdated.
The field of biomarkers could hold a solution to many of these problems. Biomarkers are blood-based tests, gene sequences or mutations, mRNA expression profiles or tissue proteins that can be used to provide evidence of the state of an organism. They are objective and measurable indicators of a biological process or condition.
Biomarkers have the potential to revolutionise medicine, allowing doctors to tailor treatment regimes to individual patients, with drugs designed to treat specific people and not the general population, as is currently the case. Although in its infancy, biomarker research looks set to have a huge positive impact on the ways in which we combat disease.
biomarkers: http://www.biomarkercenter.com/
