Collaborative cancer drug project targets research efficiency
pharmafile | May 5, 2010 | News story | Research and Development | Animal testing, Animal tests, Cancer, biomarkers, clinical drug development
A new pharma-academia project being managed by the University of Dundee is setting its sights on improving the effectiveness of cancer drug development by using biomarkers.
The MARCAR project has 12 million euros funding from the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative, and its industry partners include Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bayer and UCB.
The project is attractive to pharma as it aims to reduce the time, complexity and funding required for cancer R&D and allow drugs to come to market more rapidly.
Professor Roland Wolf, director of the Biomedical Research Institute at the University of Dundee and scientific co-ordinator of the MARCAR project, said: “The development of new drugs is a very costly process. If we could make better predictions at an early stage of drug development it would save a lot of time and money and make the whole process more efficient.
“To achieve that we need to identify biomarkers that can be used to predict the effects of drugs and reliably and robustly predict later cancer development.”
The identification of biomarkers will be achieved using a variety of techniques including epigenetic profiling, clinical imaging and bioinformatics.
Wolf added: “It would also be of benefit to pharmaceutical companies through improved internal selection of potential drugs, fewer delays and adverse effects during late-phase drug development, and improved pre-clinical carcinogenicity safety assessment prior to clinical trials. Translation of early cancer biomarkers into the clinic would also improve safety for patients participating in clinical trials.”
Less reliance on animal testing
The project also aims to reduce the need for animal testing in some areas of bio-research.
MARCAR will explore the use of non-evasive imaging techniques such as MRI to study the effects of treatments on animals, reducing the number of animals required in testing.
Animals can be used for multiple tests, and cancerous lesions will be detected earlier, foregoing the need to destroy a high number of animal subjects.
“This would potentially markedly reduce the numbers of animals needed for this kind of research and provide a much more reliable prediction of the rates of toxicity of drugs in development in man,” said Wolf.
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