By Steve Jenkinson, VP Drug Discovery and Safety Assessment, Metrion Biosciences
Prior to joining Metrion I had the privilege of co-chairing the Secondary Pharmacology Working Group under the auspice of the IQ DruSafe Consortium. This team consisted of a collaborative group of colleagues from across industry including members from Sanofi, GSK, UCB, Novartis, Vertex, Janssen, Takeda, Merck, AbbVie, Roche as well as others.
The team conducted an extensive survey to highlight similarities and differences in screening strategies and target panels across the pharmaceutical industry and as a result we identified a number of opportunities for further optimisation within the secondary pharmacology assessment of novel compounds.
This work has now been published in Nature Reviews in Drug Discovery and highlights:
- A top-level view of the current state of the art in secondary pharmacology screening.
- Best practices, including additional safety-associated targets not covered by most current screening panels.
- Approaches for interpreting and reporting off-target activities.
- Assessment of the safety impact of secondary pharmacology screening.
- Perspective on opportunities and challenges in this rapidly developing field.
Read the full publication: Brennan, R.J., Jenkinson, S., Brown, A. et al. The state of the art in secondary pharmacology and its impact on the safety of new medicines. Nat Rev Drug Discov (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41573-024-00942-3.
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