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.
GE Healthcare Life Sciences
Headquarters
Uppsala, Sweden
Years in Drug Research
18 Years
Spokesperson
Ger Brophy, General Manager Advanced Systems
Web site
About the company
GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Within life sciences, GE Healthcare provides tools and equipment for research and biotherapeutic manufacture across academia and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. GE Healthcare’s Biacore and MicroCal label-free interaction analysis systems give important insights into biological functions and disease mechanisms and facilitate efficient therapeutic development. Application areas include drug discovery, biotherapeutic development and manufacture, preclinical/clinical immunogenicity testing, and a broad range of studies across life science research. In addition, GE Healthcare provides cell analysis technologies for screening and high content analysis.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Since the early 1990s we have seen extraordinary advances in protein research, as indicated by the dramatically increasing number of identified proteins. This in turn has generated substantial demands for more functional characterization and mechanistic investigation. In the pharmaceutical industry, biotherapeutics have grown in importance. Validation of antibody binding properties that match the intended function is essential and have resulted in technologies such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and microcalorimetry, which provide the critical information for confident selection, characterization, and optimization of antibodies and process conditions, to become integral parts of the antibody development process.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
Bringing new drugs successfully to market has been, and will continue to be, a tremendous challenge for the pharmaceutical industry. Despite significant increases in funding, R&D productivity in the industry is slowing down. Developing better models for early assessment of efficacy and safety will be central to more confident drug discovery. In a competitive environment the industry will continue to be pressured for improved efficiency in its R&D efforts, shortened timelines for development and marketing, and at the same time will be exploring more new and novel drug targets than ever before. There is also increasing pressure from patients and regulatory agencies on collecting and presenting more and more detailed data for proof of drug safety and efficacy.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
Substantial advances in high throughput screening (HTS) and high-content cellular analysis have been made, but many challenges remain. With an increasing focus on new and novel targets and a drive to improve success rates, new approaches to complement existing lead discovery are being developed, including structure-guided and fragment-based lead generation. As a consequence, label-free binding assays and other biophysical analyses for hit identification and lead optimization have rapidly grown in importance. Biacore SPR-based analysis has led the way by providing high quality direct binding and selectivity data that improve the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of small molecule compound-target interactions, and are ideal for addressing novel targets. Biacore and MicroCal systems are also being successfully used to characterize and optimize leads based on relevant binding properties like thermodynamics and kinetics (on- and off-rates), and are steadily gaining in importance for label-free screening and hit validation.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
In the next 10 years we should expect to see innovations in methodology and/or hardware designs that will facilitate efficient screening of integral membrane proteins, which represent a challenging yet interesting class of drug targets. In addition, I predict a significant increase in the use of phenotypically richer cell-based models, based on differentiated cell technology, for advanced toxicology studies. Computational analyses can also be expected to advance further, which will reduce the requirements for extensive experimental screening. Lastly, binding kinetics will continue to gain acceptance as functionally relevant criteria for effective development of leads and for prediction of drug candidate performance.
