Evaluation of Permeability and P-glycoprotein Interactions: Industry Outlook

New drug discovery and development is becoming an increasingly risky and costly endeavor.A recent report has tagged the final price of bringing a drug to the market at greater than a billion US dollars with an estimated research time running into multiple years (2004). Despite the considerable investment in terms of finance and resources, the number of drug approvals per year have held steady for the last few years. The advent of combinatorial chemistry, automation, and high-throughput screening (HTS) has afforded the opportunity to test thousands of compounds, but the success rate of progressing from initial clinical testing to final approval has remained disappointingly low. Greater than 90% of the compounds entering Phase-I clinical testing fail to reach the patients and as high as 50% entering Phase-III do not make the cut (Kola and Landis, 2004).