Target valuation the key to drug discovery success

With the cost of drug development rising and the number of new launches falling, many companies are relying on novel drug targets to reach or maintain profitability, says US-based Cambridge Healthtech in a new report, Post-Genomic Target Validation: Next-Generation Approaches and Tools for Optimizing Target Selection.

Target validation has thus become the central issue in the success or failure of large-scale, genomics-based drug discovery, and researchers must find the means to choose the best among these drug targets early in the process to reduce costly attrition rates, it says. The report analyses the target validation issue in detail and profiles the efforts of competitors in this field to sift through the post-genomic data deluge, prioritise targets, and optimise resources to develop the most promising leads.

'Resurgence in target validation work will occur over time,' states Kirsten Mundt, business development manager at ESBATech and one of several ex-perts interviewed for the Cambridge Healthtech report. 'Once companies have moved compounds into development and realise that the top end of their pipeline is empty, they will start looking for new targets and ways to validate them.'

According to another expert commentator, Timothy Hoey, director of biology at Tularik, target validation is a critical bottleneck in drug discovery. 'It definitely requires more people and more varied expertise than, for example, gene discovery via expression or amplification,' he says. 'Every target is different, and you have to really think about how to craft a particular assay to ask a question that is relevant for each target.'