Elsevier

Drug Discovery Today

Volume 23, Issue 12, December 2018, Pages 1990-1995
Drug Discovery Today

Review
Informatics
The future of drug development: the paradigm shift towards systems therapeutics

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2018.09.002Get rights and content
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open access

Highlights

  • Progress in molecular and systems biology has led to a paradigm shift in drug development. This radically opens new avenues to targeted therapies with disease modifying properties.

  • This paradigm shift towards a pathology-based era of systems therapeutics has important implications for the future of drug research. This will radically change the roles of health care professionals, and the collaborations between healthcare professionals.

  • To make the promise of systems therapeutics a reality, specialists are needed not only from the pharmaceutical sciences, the biological sciences or the medical sciences but also from fields such as engineering, computational sciences and robotics.

Progress in cell biology, genetics, molecular, and systems pharmacology is the driving force behind a current paradigm shift in drug research. This paradigm shift shapes new avenues for advanced treatments that are commonly referred to as ‘systems therapeutics’. Systems therapeutics differ in many ways from current drugs because they target biological networks rather than single transduction pathways, and affect disease processes rather than physiological processes. Here, we examine how the paradigm shift towards systems therapeutics will change current scientific concepts of the interactions between drugs and diseases, the organization of research and development, as well as the clinical use and therapeutic evaluations of therapeutic interventions.

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