Speeding Drug Development with Clinical Trials in a Dish

The average time to bring a new drug to market is 12 years – assuming it makes it through the rigorous regulatory hurdles. Any technology or methodology that can expedite the drug development process or increase the likelihood of FDA approval is advantageous to both companies and patients.

Now, a new study from investigators at Coyne Scientific provides a unique look at a novel strategy – clinical trials in a dish (CTiD) – that bridges preclinical testing and clinical trials. Findings from the new study were published recently in SLAS Discovery, in an article entitled “Clinical Trials in a Dish: A Perspective on the Coming Revolution in Drug Development.”

“The pharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented challenges as the cost of developing new drugs has reached unsustainable levels, fueled in large parts by a high attrition rate in clinical development,” the authors wrote. “Strategies to bridge studies between preclinical testing and clinical trials are needed to reduce the knowledge gap and allow earlier decisions to be made on the continuation or discontinuation of further development of drugs.”

This new CTiD platform allows pharmaceutical companies to test, at the population level, novel drugs on patient cells before moving into actual clinical trials. Because current preclinical strategies don’t follow this principle, CTiD offers the potential to impact drug discovery and development significantly.

Recent demonstrations have shown various human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived (hiPSCs) cell types (cardiac, neuronal, hepatic) recapitulate a specific individual’s drug response (rather than that of a generic human being) and have opened new avenues that support the concept of screening for cell-based safety and toxicity at the level of a population.

“The discovery and development of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have opened up new avenues that support the concept of screening for cell-based safety and toxicity at the level of a population,” the authors penned. The researchers continued, stating that CTiD “allows testing medical therapies for safety or efficacy on cells collected from a representative sample of human patients, before moving into actual clinical trials. It can be applied to the development of drugs for specific populations, and it allows predicting not only the magnitude of effects but also the incidence of patients in a population who will benefit or be harmed by these drugs. This, in turn, can lead to the selection of safer drugs to move into clinical development, resulting in a reduction in attrition.”

The concept of CTiD is to satisfy, in an in vitro setting, the defining biological truth that establishes the need for a multipatient clinical trial, which is that drug responses vary by human. CTiD studies are efficient, allow the study of a range of clinical doses, and can be executed at a fraction of the cost outside of the rigid and heavily regulated clinical testing environment.

CTiD studies are poised to revolutionize thinking about practical, immediate, and near-term applications in the field of drug discovery and development. CTiD can lead to insights that cannot be obtained so early and economically in drug development by any other approach. Although still requiring improvements and enhancements, CTiD offers to refine the selection of drugs to move into clinical development, leading to reduced attrition and enabling safe drugs that address unmet medical needs to reach patients more quickly.