Bioinformatics companies, however, are using the brute force of old technologies to crunch their data. We're going to have to have a breakthrough here. Physiome has developed a technology called In Silico Cell that helps researchers create models of living systems to predict which drugs will work before they begin clinical trials. The program can tell researchers that a certain heart drug, for example, will cause the left ventricle to expand. Money spent on research and development at pharmaceutical companies has increased at a staggering rate.
Drug discovery is an imprecise process that relies heavily on serendipity.
Pharmaceutical companies come up with about 140 new drug candidates per year, but only about seven are marketed. Big pharmaceuticals typically aim to develop two new drugs per year, and most have failed. Scientists tested the In Silico Cell on a heart drug developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb. With the In Silico Cell system, however, Physiome mathematically coded biological models of men and women with different genetic backgrounds to test the drug. You could see that the female was three times more sensitive to this drug.