The Next-Generation Drug Discovery Community will unite researchers at Cambridge University and MIT with partners from the information technology, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to find ways to speed up development of the next generation of drugs--particularly those that treat diseases with complex causes such as cancers, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and diabetes.
"Our aims are to develop safer and more effective new drugs, faster and cheaper," said Douglas Lauffenburger, the Whitaker Professor of Biological Engineering and Chemical Engineering and director of the Biological Engineering Division at MIT. "Another aim is reduce the current reliance on animal experiments to predict effects on humans."
Drug discovery is an extremely lengthy and costly process. On average, it takes new treatments $800 million and 12 years to reach the market. But the sequencing of the human genome has made available a vast array of new information. CMI's newest initiative will move away from the old "one gene, one protein, one drug" paradigm and will adopt a multidisciplinary, systems biology approach.
"There are major computational challenges involved if we are going to make sense of all the data and use it to start building systems-level views of life and disease processes," said Gos Micklem, part of the Cambridge team. "As we start to do this, and take into account the genetic variations among individuals, this opens up new possibilities in evaluating disease susceptibility, improved diagnosis and the ability to offer therapy tailored to each individual patient."