Is In Silico Simulation the next big thing for Pharma?
by Ramesh J Chougule
While we know that discovering a drug costs 900 MSUD and takes approximately 15 years for a pharmaceutical company, there are technological advances like in silico simulations which are helping to improve effectiveness and reduce timelines in the early stages of the drug discovery life cycle. This technology is able to model the interactions and relationships among proteins, enzymes, receptors and chaperones. This gives a representation of various cellular processes, biochemical pathways and the associated cell signals.
These biological events have a very complex nature. Multiple inputs stimulate the pathways and those generate another set of complex outputs in the integrated networks. There are multiple cell types which add the complexity to this and different contexts and environments add as another variable to these developments. Thus, in a hugely complex set up, if we are able to create a simulation model on how a specific drug would react to the specific cellular situation, it will provide immense benefit to the drug discovery process as below:
- We will be able to narrow down the search for molecules tens or hundreds time faster.
- We will be able to reduce potentially failing candidates in later stages of drug discovery.
- It will increase the number of possible targets with a wider and holistic analysis.
While there are definite benefits from in silico simulations, we need to understand the answers to these questions for technology to be ready:
- The amounts of data processed in simulations is huge - is the technology ready for the same?
- Certainly the technology solution needs an innovation on the computing speed and ability of handle huge data. Is it looking at something like in memory computing?
- Building an application wouldn't be a very complex task but building it flexible enough to address and accommodate every individualistic variation is a mammoth task. So how much should be the configurability of this model?
It will certainly prove to be a path breaking innovation for drug discovery and next decade is waiting to see a concrete solution to address this space.
About the Author
Ramesh heads the SAP Life Sciences practice in Enterprise Solutions and manages strategy and planning, program delivery, pre sales support and competency building for the practice. He has published various articles in leading pharma publications. Ramesh will blog on ERP in life sciences, in silico drug discovery, and IT evolution in the pharmaceutical value chain.
