In the industry’s efforts to shorten the drug discovery process, important goals are to pick the safest developable molecule faster and to have access to assays that can provide fast, useful data to enable progression decisions.

These are critical elements because in R&D there are far too many delays and failures due to not initially selecting a suitable molecule, and/or having insufficient data to judge real world significance of animal findings during development.

One Million Solutions in Health is happy to announce the completely re-engineered Drug Safety Technology Consortium, an initiative in drug safety assessment to address these issues for the industry as a whole.

This consortium works in the pre-competitive drug safety space to find, evaluate and validate new technologies more quickly, with less time and money than if it was invested by individual companies. Technologies that are being preferentially investigated focus on systems that provide mechanism of action data. Additionally, we are validating tools where the output from the assays will increase our understanding and can therefore be used in the early stages of compound selection and optimization. And, we are working to validate new technologies, e.g., organ-on-a-chip and in silico modeling tools.

Such focused data outputs can often be informative in the development phase, when thorough understanding of observed safety signals are often required to move a molecule forward. By reviewing technologies that can positively impact the pre-clinical safety space in a more focused, industry-wide fashion, and conducting rapid, thorough evaluations, this consortium is time and cost effective. The evaluations and validations will also be implemented more consistently with the guidance from, and interaction with, the Consortium.

For this effort to be effective and successful it is industry-driven. The Consortium is housed in this not-for-profit organization, with the ability to take administrative functions and much of the interaction with technology providers off of your organization’s plate. The industry partners can focus on driving and evaluating the science.

By assessing new technologies as a group, we can more quickly and efficiently identify the new technologies that will help us bring better molecules forward, optimizing the likelihood of them becoming successful, safe drugs.

If you are interested in joining, please contact Dawn at dawn.vandam@onemillionsolutionsinhealth1.org