Faster Insights And Better Science In The Search For Desperately Needed New Therapies

In a previous post  we noted the increasing importance of biologics as therapeutic agents, with 37% of the drugs approved by the FDA in 2017 being biologic entities. A recent article in Chemical & Engineering News (June 4, 2018, pp 28-33) focused on activities in immuno-oncology, where biologic checkpoint inhibitors are being tested in combination with other immunotherapies: there are currently ca. 250 small molecule- and antibody-based immunotherapies in clinical studies, and > 1100 clinical trials in 2017 combined a checkpoint inhibitor with another treatment. 

With this increasingly urgent drive to discover and develop novel bio therapeutics in areas such as oncology, it is crucial that researchers are equipped with the best possible tools to capture, manage and exploit all the available data, and we commented that “In the area SAR and bioSAR, underlying chemical structural and bio-sequence intelligence are key requirements for meaningful exploration and analysis, and these are often only available in separate and distinct applications with different user interfaces, when ideally they should be accessible through a unified chemistry/bio-sequence search and display application, supported by a full range of substructure and sequence analysis and display tools.”

In this post we drill into these requirements in more detail and discuss how an ideal bioSAR tool should support faster insights and better science in the search for desperately needed new therapies.