Chinese drug discovery market predicted to grow 23% per annum

China’s health and medical industry is advancing rapdily within genomics, combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening, China has been recognised as an important location to which drug discovery is being outsourced.

The Chinese drug discovery market reached US$315.0 million in 2009 and is predicted to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2009 to 2016.

China has opportunities for scientific expertise and complete infrastructure, which are important for drug discovery activities. Separate from India, China is also viewed as a profitable market, this will assist pharmaceutical companies improve drug finding at a reasonable cost.

 

Eli Lilly CIO Michael Heim says Lilly will increase use of cloud computing in clinical data management

Eli Lilly’s CIO Michael Heim says that the drug giant’s right to know where in the cloud its data resides, and to know the provider’s disaster recovery plans are chief issues that will drive the use of cloud computing in clinical data within drug discovery and development projects.

An interview with Michael Heim is available at InformationWeek

Clinical approval success highest for smallest firms among the top 50 Pharmaceutial companies

The top 10 pharmaceutical companies out of the world’s top 50 have lower estimated overall clinical approval success rates than do smaller firms in that group, but nonetheless appeared to have some R&D productivity advantages, according to a new study completed by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.

Despite experiencing lower overall clinical success rates, the top 10 firms terminated a greater proportion of their failures in early stage clinical testing, compared to the other 40 companies in the group, the study found. Failing early lets developers redirect resources into other projects and avoid more costly later stage failures.

While the very largest firms had lower approval success rates, they did make the decision to terminate earlier in the development process, which can help improve productivity of their new product pipelines.

The study was based on 1,734 compounds that entered clinical testing between 1993 and 2004, for the top 50 companies, which had 2006 revenues of more than $1 billion. The timeframe allowed for analysis of the full development cycle. Clinical approval success rate is the share of investigational new compounds entering clinical testing that eventually obtain FDA marketing approval.
The study, reported in the September/October Tufts CSDD Impact Report, released today, also found that:
1.  Small molecules accounted for 85% of the drugs that entered the clinical pipelines of top 50 pharmaceutical firms in the 1993-04 period.
2. Large molecule clinical approval success rates outpaced small molecules by nearly 2:1 for each top-50 pharma size group examined.
3. Across all top company size groups, transitioning compounds from Phase II to Phase III was a substantial hurdle.

the study is available at http://csdd.tufts.edu/

personalized medicine might be making drug development more complicated

According to a new report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University 12 to 50 percent of the drugs companies are developing, depending on the company, involved a personalized medicine approach.

The Tufts report is based on a survey of 25 companies, large and small, to which 16 companies responded, as well as interviews with representatives of 13 companies.

Relatively few drugs are now accompanied by such so-called companion diagnostic tests. They are most common in oncology. The breast cancer drug Herceptin, for instance, is given only to women whose tumors have an abundance of a protein called Her2.

According to the report Other key therapeutic areas in which personalized medicine is making headway include cardiovascular, central nervous system, and immunologic therapies, whereas personalized medicine development is just getting started for metabolic and respiratory therapies, as well as virology.

 

Paper instead ‘chips’ may be used as medical testing devices to fight disease

George Whitesides, a Harvard chemistry professor has designed technology in which patients’ blood is dropped on a piece of paper, and water-repellent ink resembling that of a comic book creates diagnostic colors on the other side, CNN reports. The technology may be incorporated into mobile phones, according to CNN.

Whitesides’ prototype allows for testing of STDs and non-sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and gastroenteritis.

 

UK’s Medical Research Council grants Clinical Research consortium $6.4 million to develop chips & software to use mobile phones/PCs as testing devices for sexually transmitted disease (STD)

UK’s Medical Research Council grants a Clinical Research consortium $6.4 million to develop chips & software to use mobile phones/PCs as testing devices for sexually transmitted disease (STD)

If successful individuals will drop their blood, urine or saliva on a mobile chip, which they then insert into a mobile phone or PC. Software on the phone or PC then delivers a diagnosis, schedules a clinic appointment or sends an electronic prescription to a pharmacy. Consumers will be able to purchase the chips in vending machines or at a local pharmacy