Clarivate Analytics launches new product suite, reducing risk and saving time for researchers selecting next drug target
PHILADELPHIA, March 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — In the field of drug discovery, selecting a target for preclinical development is difficult, and selecting the right target is arguably the most important step in the entire drug discovery process. Taking a wrong first step in the target selection process can be very costly. According to the Centre for Medicines Research (CMR), in 2015 the probability of successfully moving a new drug candidate from Phase I to market was less than 10% across all therapy areas, with efficacy being the reason for failure in more than half of Phase II and Phase III trials.
To mitigate this risk and associated expense, Drug Research Advisor, a new suite of pre-clinical workflow tools from Clarivate Analytics, is now available. Drug Research Advisor integrates the major steps of preclinical research into a single, cloud-based workflow, enabling faster access to information allowing improved decision-making. With Drug Research Advisor, users can now interrogate crucial manually-curated content types from Clarivate Analytics IntegritySM and MetaCore products with one tool, using the latest visualization and analytics.
The first app within Drug Research Advisor, Target Druggability supports target identification and selection research by integrating drug, biological, experimental and competitive intelligence into a single interactive search tool. Clarivate data scientists built in a specific scoring algorithm that assesses a selection of targets for a specific disease, and scores them in order of their potential to be best- or first-in-class. This scoring system helps reduce the selection process from 12 weeks down to less than 30 minutes.
With increased efficiency, companies can now review more targets and select the ones most appropriate for their portfolios, eliminating time and money spent on the unqualified ones; thus saving millions of dollars in costs and, more importantly, allowing companies to bring more lifesaving medicines to market.
“Considering the many factors to evaluate when identifying opportunities for the next development of a first- or best-in-class treatment, researchers are regularly challenged to rapidly evaluate the target landscape surrounding an indication or pathway,” said Leo Lafferty-Whyte, Head of Discovery & Translational Science Products for Clarivate Analytics. “The Target Druggability application simplifies our customers’ day-to-day workflows by making increasingly complex data more visual and, therefore, usable.”
How the app works
With Target Druggability, users begin searching by condition, target or drug, and immediate results show the number of targets associated with that condition. Accompanying those results are visual analytics by type of molecule and target family. Useful color-coding, grouping and sizing can also be used to show metadata surrounding these targets, such as the highest phase a drug has reached for that target, active vs. non active programs, target molecule type, biomarkers, animal models and genetic evidence levels.
This image is an example of how the Target Druggability results display visually.
From here, users can begin evaluating levels of risk – novel versus proven targets – and ranking the results based on the proprietary scoring algorithm, which interrogates the evidence around the targets.
Going to a single target level, users can also begin reviewing related information for the targets, including accompanying summaries of manually curated information.
What customers are saying
With 58% of targets with drugs in active development having two or more companies already researching them, selecting a new target to research has become a risky business with the need to genuinely differentiate from the competition and find a niche at the very start of the process.
This is why Clarivate engaged with customers in the design of the product. Their feedback was incredibly positive.
One participant, Patrick Sieber, Senior Lab Head Cardiovascular and Fibrosis R&D Biology at Actelion, said “With Target Druggability I am able to quickly have an overview of the target landscape, including conditions and competition.”
“Target Druggability can support researchers with the process of selecting a target for the development of new drugs by providing the right context for decision making,” said Dave Deninger, Senior Research Scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, who also participated in the pilot.