The biggest unmet medical need is to provide safe and efficacious drugs to the patient. However, the pharmaceutical industry is currently facing a litany of challenges, including but not limited to: 1) lead identification; 2) lead optimization & prioritization; 3) predicting side effects and tox…
The biggest unmet medical need is to provide safe and efficacious drugs to the patient. However, the pharmaceutical industry is currently facing a litany of challenges, including but not limited to: 1) lead identification; 2) lead optimization & prioritization; 3) predicting side effects and toxicity; 4) meeting efficacy requirements; 5) maximizing patent life on the market; and 6) product rescue/repositioning. As a result, R&D success rates are falling, and R&D spending is not contributing to increased sales. According to research by Jack Scannell published in Nature, “...the number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950, falling around 80-fold in inflation-adjusted terms.” Early discovery efforts and pre-clinical drug discovery/development accounts for over $500 million of the overall cost of a drug’s development. Traditional safety assessment technologies are not able to provide global mechanistic insights. When effectively integrated into current safety profiling, this information will significantly improve current portfolio risk adjustment outcomes. Enter Cyclica. Cyclica is a technology company that improves drug discovery and development by reducing complex Big Data into high utility insights, specifically by determining interactions between drugs and all known proteins. These pre-clinical insights/predictions will improve current attrition rates of lead therapeutic compounds, and improve patient outcomes with fewer side effects. Through a partnership with IBM Research, Cyclica is creating vast stores of proprietary data that is used for analyzing cross reactivity of molecules to assess safety and efficacy. As such, Cyclica risk adjusts development pipelines, and provides actionable analysis to help guide pharmaceutical development strategies. Cyclica’s proprietary Ligand Express™ platform provides a new method to predict drug safety, a major cause of attrition in drug discovery/development pipelines. The platform reduces the failure risk of drug discovery/development projects by enabling the company’s clients to anticipate a drug candidate’s side effects prior to clinical trials, thereby enabling more informed R&D investment decisions and risk mitigation strategies. The company’s value proposition focuses on the fundamental problem involving the quality of structural proteomics data and access to it, and therefore has the potential to impact the entire drug discovery and development value chain. Ligand Express™ uses an integrated systems approach to index the entire proteome. The platform annotates molecules to their basic building blocks to test and model a drug’s impact on all aspects of human biology. Analysis of these building blocks reveals consistent drug-protein interactions, which are indexed based upon their patterns. The value-add of Cyclica’s technology includes: 1) Predicting drug side effects and toxicity; 2) Prioritizing & Optimizing existing drug candidates; 3) Repurposing existing ‘safe’ drugs; and 4) Identifying the mechanism of action for on-target and off-target drug activity. Given the often unrealistic cost of drug discovery, there is a significant and growing market need for disruptive technologies, fresh discovery platforms and innovative approaches that significantly improve profit margins for a major cross-section of therapeutic candidates, not just blockbuster drugs. As a result, the $85 billion global in silico pharmaceuticals market is expected to grow to $140 billion by 2015. Growth in the in silico pharmaceuticals market is being driven by a need to develop integrated platforms that can design more efficacious drugs, predict drug safety profiles accurately, identify effective peptide inhibitors of protein-protein interactions and establish highly integrated technology infrastructure for both drug discovery and delivery. Pharmaceutical products with fewer and/or less severe side effects also represent a largely untapped market with significant potential, as the industry looks to find more innovative medicines to diversify product portfolios and grow revenues. Overall, technology development is trending towards an integrated pipeline of high-throughput computational methods, protein-protein and protein-ligand interaction platforms, and integrated predictive platforms for drug discovery and delivery. In short, the in silico drug discovery space has matured under, and is ripe for disruptive advances that will help redefine the market and pharma R&D.
Team (1)
Sectors Cyclica Inc serves:
Life Sciences
Technology
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