Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
High-throughput screening technologies are widely used in
the early stages of drug discovery in order to rapidly evaluate the
properties of thousands of compounds. In most cases, pre-existing
libraries of compounds are used, although in some cases customized
libraries are employed [12]. In addition, before large naive libraries
are tested, many companies will use a library that consists of
compounds that have already been approved as drugs. If a compound
that has already been FDA approved shows potential for a particular
target, R&D departments will save enormous amounts of both time
and money [13]. Altogether, high-throughput screening technologies
are paving the way to the development of novel strategies that will
enable the discovery of drugs at aff ordable commercial risks for as
yet incurable and rare diseases.
9.3
Stem Cells Used for Lead Discovery
Unmet medical needs are essentially the stimulus behind the
development of new therapies. Drug discovery is driven by the
need to add medical value while concomitantly limiting the costs
for the pharmaceutical industry. Understanding and treatment of
the pathology, rather than symptomatic relief, is the cardinal factor
in drug discovery. This approach necessitates model systems that
will emulate the pathological conditions as faithfully as possible.
An excellent way to achieve this is to rely on human-derived cells
rather than animal-derived cell lines that express specific proteins
to mimic a human disease or condition. The use of animal-derived
cells or tissues to develop selective drugs is problematic, since their
success in treatment of animals or animal models does not always
translate into efficacy in humans. There are vast diff erences in the
biological background between the animal model and humans.
These diff erences are believed to be major factors in the difficulty of
matching treatment success in these models to the actual beneficial
use of such drugs for human clinical trials [14]. Another approach
taken is to use immortalized or cancerous human cells to obtain
unlimited number of cells for drug-testing trials compared with
primary cells directly isolated from human tissue. These are in
many cases better models than the animal equivalent, but they still
do not necessarily provide an accurate indication of the eff ects of
compounds on normal human cells. This is due to the fact that any
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