Big pharma is big for a reason. According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America – the main representative of US drug companies and scientists – it takes on average 10 years to develop a new medicine, at a cost of roughly $2.6bn. Faced with such eye-watering numbers, it is clear why pharma is such a high-risk business – and why drugs often come at such a steep cost to those who need?them.
But what if ill-fated drug candidates could be rooted out earlier? That is the promise of a new type of high-speed, high-mass-resolution spectroscopy technique that has been developed by physicist Ian Gilmore of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK, and others. Unlike that mainstay of cell biology – super-resolution fluorescence microscopy – Gilmore’s “OrbiSIMS” technique has no need for fluorescent tagging. In principle, it can therefore be directed at objects that are incompatible with that approach – and in particular metabolites, the conveyors of all metabolic processes.
By tracking how metabolites change in response to new drugs, OrbiSIMS could let researchers spot previously undetectable signs of failure in the first phase of drugs testing, freeing up time and money to be redirected elsewhere. “It could open up completely new discoveries,” Gilmore claims. […]
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