A new SLAS Discovery article available now for free ahead-of-print, offers perspective from researchers at Coyne Scientific (Atlanta, GA) about Clinical Trials in a Dish (CTiD), a novel strategy that bridges preclinical testing and clinical trials.
The pharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented challenges as the cost of developing new drugs reaches unsustainable levels, fueled in large part by high attrition rates in clinical development. This new CTiD platform allows pharmaceutical companies to test, at the population level, novel drugs on patient cells before moving into actual clinical trials. Because current preclinical strategies don’t follow this principle, CTiD offers the potential to significantly impact drug discovery and development.
Recent demonstrations show various human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived (hiPSCs) cell types (cardiac, neuronal, hepatic) recapitulate a specific individual’s drug response (rather than that of a generic human being) and have opened up new avenues that support the concept of screening for cell-based safety and toxicity at the level of a population. The concept of CTiD is to satisfy, in an in vitro setting, the defining biological truth that establishes the need for a multi-patient clinical trial, which is that drug responses vary by human. CTiD studies are efficient, allow the study of a range of clinical doses, and can be executed at a fraction of the cost outside of the rigid and heavily regulated clinical testing environment.
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