Here's another new article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that (for once) isn't titled something like "The Productivity Crisis in Drug Research: Hire Us And We'll Consult Your Problems Away". This one is a look back at where drugs have come from.
Looking over drug approvals (259 of them) between 1999 and 2008, the authors find that phenotypic screens account for a surprising number of the winners. (For those not in the business, a phenotypic screen is one where you give compounds to some cell- or animal-based assay and look for effects. That's in contrast to the target-based approach, where you identify some sort of target as being likely important in a given disease state and set out to find a molecule to affect it. Phenotypic screens were the only kinds around in the old days (before, say, the mid-1970s or thereabouts), but they've been making a comeback - see below!)
Out of the 259 approvals, there were 75 first-in-class drugs and 164 followers (the rest were imaging agents and the like). 100 of the total were discovered using target-based approaches, 58 through phenotypic approaches, and 18 through modifying natural substances. There were also 56 biologics, which were all assigned to the target-based category. But out of the first-in-class small molecules, 28 of them could be assigned to phenotypic assays and only 17 to target-based approaches. Considering how strongly tilted the industry has been toward target-based drug discovery, that's really disproportionate. CNS and infectious disease were the therapeutic areas that benefited the most from phenotypic screening, which makes sense. We really don't understand the targets and mechanisms in the former, and the latter provide what are probably the most straightforward and meaningful phenotypic assays in the whole business. The authors' conclusion:(this) leads us to propose that a focus on target-based drug discovery, without accounting sufficiently for the MMOA (molecular mechanism of action) of small-molecule first-in-class medicines, could be a technical reason contributing to high attrition rates. Our reasoning for this proposal is that the MMOA is a key factor for the success of all approaches, but is addressed in different ways and at different points in the various approaches. . .
. . .The increased reliance on hypothesis-driven target-based approaches in drug discovery has coincided with the sequencing of the human genome and an apparent belief by some that every target can provide the basis for a drug. As such, research across the pharmaceutical industry as well as academic institutions has increasingly focused on targets, arguably at the expense of the development of preclinical assays that translate more effectively into clinical effects in patients with a specific disease.
I have to say, I agree (and have said so here on the blog before). It's good to see some numbers put to that belief, though. This, in fact, was the reason why I thought that the NIH funding for translational research might be partly spent on new phenotypic approaches. Will we look back on the late 20th century/early 21st as a target-based detour in drug discovery?
