To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
ESA Biosciences, Inc.
Headquarters
Chelmsford, Mass.
Location(s)
Buckinghamshire, England
Years in Drug Research
26 Years
Spokesperson
Robert J. Rosenthal, PhD, President and CEO of ESA parent company, Magellan Biosciences
Web site
About the company
A Magellan Biosciences company, ESA has a distinguished history of innovation, fueled by a commitment to solve specific applications challenges and improve outcomes for customers. We manufacture a full range of specialty HPLC detectors, components, reagents, and consumables, configured as turnkey systems designed to help scientists achieve maximum performance: integrated components, along with expert chemistry, application, and service support--and POC diagnostics. Our products can be found in virtually every type of, biomedical-research, analytical chemistry, industrial, and clinical-diagnostic lab worldwide, and are used in applications from pharmaceutical research and QC, to oncology, food and beverage safety, and scientific discovery.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Ten years ago, ESA started exploring free radical biology and oxidative stress. Today, they’re accepted disease mechanisms, life-science research has moved from single analytes to 'omics and lower limits of detection, and in drug development, there’s need for a greater understanding of the compounds in the library. As drug formulations have become increasingly complex, the imperative to “see” everything is paramount. This has spurred us to innovate with new tools – electrochemical detection-based metabolomics systems to measure the molecules critical to important biological processes, new cells to synthesize metabolites from parent compounds, and a universal detector – the Corona CAD.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
Every day researchers are uncovering intriguing clues about disease pathways that may help provide earlier and more-precise diagnosis and reveal promising new targets for therapeutics. Scientists are beginning to understand the metabolic underpinnings of how and when drugs work, interact, and cause side effects. But the more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to understand – how very complicated biological processes are. For example, in humans, drugs can metabolize differently than they do in vitro or in animal models. An off-target effect of a drug may be devastating in trying to treat one disease, but might be the key to uncovering a cure in another. Solving the challenges of the next decade will require a better understanding of what is going on at a cellular level in context, in vivo, and perhaps even in real time--a tremendous challenge for us all.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
During the last 10 years, consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, increasing competitive pressures, and a cautious regulatory environment post-Vioxx have driven more standardization in analytical systems and methods. If in the past, scientists reveled in coaxing results from their own cobbled-together analytical tools, today, they demand complete, applications-specific answer systems with easily transferable methods that deliver consistent results regardless of when, where, or by whom the sample is run. Analytics during the final development and manufacturing scale-up stage of the drug-development process has been a key area of growth. The FDA’s Process Analytical Technology initiative has driven the need for new on-line tools to ensure quality. Formulations themselves have increased in complexity--today’s pharmaceuticals may be made up of dozens of compounds – and even the minutest quantities of impurities can affect performance or cause side effects. This continues to push the limits of detection ever-lower for analytical instruments.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
Over the next 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry will redefine their measures of success. Company fortunes will no longer be made developing a few blockbuster drugs designed for the masses, but by developing masses of focused therapeutics, targeted specifically to a few. This will drive the need for cost-effective, reliable, sample-in/answers-out tools that can be used throughout the continuum of drug development--from research and methods-development in many different labs--to production on the factory floor. Drug-discovery will also need to proceed on a parallel track with new diagnostic platforms that make near-patient testing fast, accurate, and foolproof.
