The process of drug discovery and development is expensive. A recent report from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the median cost to bring a single new drug to market was close to a billion dollars, at $985million US dollars. Overall, in the year 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83billion on research and development of potential new drugs. Clearly, developing new drugs is a pricey process and many potential drugs never make it to market.
Drugs that never make it to market, or failed drugs, are one of the main reasons for the high cost of drug development. A recent article found that 90% of drugs fail to make it out of clinical trials, and this number is even higher for drugs that fail to move past discovery. And while there are many reasons for drug failure, the software company Dotmatics is hoping to help drug discoverers reduce human error, reduce failure rate, and reduce research and development cost.
The company announced last month the release of its Small Molecule Drug Discovery Solution, a new software platform that helps automate workflows and improve data management. Mike McKee, president of Dotmatics said, “While small molecule science is making incredible progress, the cost of the drug discoveries is higher than ever, burdened by complex workflows and fragmented data and analysis solutions, we want to drastically improve this process by developing an integrated platform that features a great breadth of tools.”
With the software, researchers have access to tools that aid in sample logistics, quality control analysis, and a tool called structure-activity relationship which helps in the early process of drug discovery. See video above for details.
For now, the process of drug discovery and development is still a complex and difficult process. However, Dotmatics software will help researchers streamline their processes and hopefully help to more efficiently and cost-effectively discover new drugs to treat patients and improve health.
Sources: JAMA; Congressional Budget Office; Acta Pharmaceutic Sinica B; Dotmatics;
