Feature

Bioinformatics: Drug Companies on Speed

The marriage of IT and medical research may be just what traditional pharmaceutical companies need to survive in an increasingly competitive field.

October 15, 2001 — CIO — Scientists at Aventis Pharma had just finished animal testing on a promising new drug to treat asthma, and they knew they had to move fast. Two of their biggest competitors, GlaxoSmithKline and Schering-Plough, had similar treatments further along in the drug testing pipelines. Both companies were already proceeding with human trials to test the effectiveness of the same approach Aventis was studying -- an anti-interleukin-5 (anti-IL-5) therapy designed to inhibit a protein thought to foster asthma attacks. So rather than starting late down the same protracted and pricey path, Aventis embarked on an unusual shortcut; it turned to Entelos, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, to run a new kind of software that could simulate a clinical trial on two virtual asthmatic patients named Alan and Bill. Results from the computer simulation program led Aventis to doubt that the anti-IL-5 therapy would be an effective agent against acute asthma attacks. The same conclusion was reached by its competitors after years of expensive clinical trials.

The biosimulation technology that Aventis used to achieve such cost-effective results is just one in a growing arsenal of new information technologies that offer tremendous potential to streamline and reduce the costs of drug development. Grouped under the umbrella of bioinformatics, these technologies all involve the use of computers to store, organize, generate, retrieve, analyze and share genomic, biological and chemical data for drug discovery. And their usage is spawning an entirely new branch of IT.

"It’s a magical time in the history of science now that we have so much computing power and storage capacity," says Robert Dinerstein, a senior research scientist in the Bridgewater, N.J., laboratories of Frankfurt, Germany-based Aventis Pharma.

It wasn’t always so. The pharmaceutical industry, a conservative bastion of empirically minded scientists, has been slow to embrace new technologies. And, in fact, for much of the 20th century not much changed about the trial-and-error process of creating new medicines. Historically, the drug discovery process has invariably begun with a theory about the possible cause of a particular disease. "Some idea got us started -- either from scientific literature, a particular researcher’s expertise or just someone’s crazy idea," Dinerstein explains. The preclinical research continues with the synthesis and purification of a compound that appears to affect a certain protein or molecule thought to be involved in the disease process. Using test tubes and petri dishes, scientists then conduct efficacy and safety tests on that compound or drug candidate. If it passes that hurdle, they move to more extensive preclinical and clinical testing processes to determine how the body responds to the compound -- how it’s absorbed, distributed, metabolized and excreted (pharmacokinetics) -- as well as the chemical effects of the drug on the body (pharmacodynamics). Then the testing begins on animals and proceeds to three phases of clinical trials in humans.