Drug pipeline
A drug pipeline is the set of compounds (ie potential drugs) that a Pharmaceutical company has under development at any given point in time.
The development of drugs involves various phases that can broadly be grouped in 3 stages: pre-clinical, clinical trials and marketing (or post-approval). Pharmaceutical companies usually have a number of compounds in their pipelines.
The drug pipeline is an important indicator of the value and future prospects of a company. Usually the more compounds in the pipeline, and the more advanced stage that these are in the better. Other factors that are taken into account when assessing the value of a pipeline include the size of the target market of each drug, the market share that the drug is expected to capture and the risk that it will not be approved.
The cost of developing a new drug is astronomical – typically a drug costs many hundreds of millions and can reach 1 billion dollars over 15-17 years. Assessing this risk and filtering out as early as possible compounds that may not eventually get approved is essential to the pharmaceutical industry and involves checking for drug effectiveness and non toxicity.
These toxic or adverse events are hard to predict accurately, the reason being that our knowledge of biology, disease mechanisms and drug design is incomplete; what appears to work in the laboratory may not always work in humans.
Adverse event prediction is therefore an important task that is highly relevant to the entire drug pipeline.
There are a number of approaches to predicting adverse events including cell line assays and animal models. A relatively recent method is based on mining the scientific literature and correlating evidence from seemingly unrelated drugs or indications to suggest adverse events on the basis of commonalities of their profiles.
If done correctly this type of analysis can offer quite good predictive accuracy and significant lead times which translates to lower cost and development times for new drugs.