BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Industrializing tox

August 6, 2001 7:00 AM UTC

About 25% of compounds fail due to toxicity after they reach the clinic, making the early elimination of toxic compounds important for companies looking to cut the cost of drug development. But there is still a relative dearth of scientific understanding of toxicological mechanisms, and the lack of reliable high throughput toxicological screening leaves most companies with no alternative to traditional, low throughput in vivo testing.

Dale Johnson, founder and chief scientific officer of ddPlatform LLC (Emeryville, Calif.), an in silico drug discovery consulting firm, estimates that 75% of R&D costs are related to compound failures, of which a third are related to toxicity problems...