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    • SAR Trek

    • In a previous Blog post we highlighted the day-to-day informatics problems facing IT/IS staff and researchers in biopharma companies as they struggle to discover and develop better drugs faster and more cheaply. Key among these was the challenge of dealing with the data deluge – more complex data at greater volumes, in multiple formats and often stored in disparate internal and external data silos. As Jerry Karabelas, former head of R&D at Novartis quipped, in an updated and repurposed phrase from Coleridge “Data, data everywhere, and not a drug I think.” And that ...

    • Light at the end of lead discovery tunnel?

    • Drug discovery is hard (nine out of ten drug candidates fail), time-consuming (typically 10 - 15 years), and expensive (Tufts’ 2016 estimate $2.87Bn). But things are getting better, right? In 2017, although the EMA only approved 35 new active substances,  FDA drug approvals hit a 21-year high, with 46 new molecular entities approved, the highest number since 1996. This was mix of 29 small molecules and, demonstrating their increasing therapeutic importance, 17 biologics (nine antibodies, five peptides, two enzymes, and an antibody-drug conjugate). But of the 46 ...

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