In Vitro Pharmacology for Drug Discovery & Development

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS ARTICLE:

What Is In Vitro Pharmacology?

What Is Its Role in the Drug Discovery & Development Cycle?

Can We Fully Replace Animal Testing?

The commercialization of a new?drug or medicine?takes an average of 10 to 15 years. It is indeed an incredibly costly and?complex process?that involves multiple rounds of assays and tests. This is because bringing a new drug to market is extremely regulated by dedicated agencies (the?EMA?in the European Union and the?FDA?in the United States, just to mention some examples).

The considerations of?efficacy and safety?must be taken into account throughout the entire drug development process, from the screening of candidate molecules and the identification of the lead compound until the very last stage of pre-clinical trials. Thus, to generate high-quality data on the safety and efficacy of their drug candidates, researchers very often take advantage of?in vitro?pharmacology.

In this article, you will learn about the role of?in vitro?pharmacology studies at the different stages of drug discovery and development.

1. What Is In Vitro Pharmacology?

To understand the concept of?in vitro?pharmacology?it is usually useful to split it into two terms:

• in vitro, which refers to studies or experiments conducted on microorganisms and cells outside of their normal biological environment
• pharmacology, which is the study of the effects of drugs and pharmaceuticals on living organisms

Putting them together, it is now easy to see that?in vitro?pharmacology is nothing other than?the research of the biological effects of drugs and pharmaceuticals, conducted outside of living organisms?(in opposition to research performed on living animals or humans).

But what is the purpose of these studies? What information do they generate? How do they help the pharmaceutical field? To answer these questions, we first need to get familiar with the drug discovery and development process, i.e., to understand how drugs are created, in order to see next where in vitro?pharmacology fits in that process.

2. What Is Its Role in the Drug Discovery and Development Cycles?

Any new drug or pharmaceutical that enters the market is the result of long and rigorous development, testing, and approval processes.

After the COVID-19 Pandemic, many people became familiar with the different phases of clinical trials, in which new drugs are tested in humans to collect data on drug safety and efficacy. However, the long and bumpy road that precedes it, which takes from the identification of a drug candidate to its production for clinical evaluation, is usually less known.

2.1. In Vitro?Pharmacology in Drug Discovery

Before drug development comes?drug discovery, the process by which?new candidate drugs are identified.

• Target identification

Fundamental science helps researchers understand how a disease or condition starts and progresses, thus making it possible to conceive new ways of interfering with these pathological processes. This is done by?identifying therapeutical targets?(a cellular structure, a surface receptor, or a transcription factor, just to name a few examples) against which the drug candidates are expected to act, both selectively and effectively.

• Hit discovery

Target identification is then followed by the?screening of large libraries of compounds?to find a?pool of drug candidates with the desired properties?(or “hits”). As a result of additional tests, the pool is further narrowed down, and only?the most promising compounds?(or “leads”) are selected.

In silico?screening approaches?are a valuable tool since they help speed up this stage and save resources. Yet,?in vitro?assays?are for the time being still necessary to validate bioinformatic predictions.

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