Effective integration of systems biology, biomarkers, biosimulation and modelling in streamlining drug development

The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Sciences (EUFEPS) has long established itself as leaders in the field of interdisciplinary meetings to discuss issues that face drug development. It's ever popular and well attended "Optimizing Drug Development" series has tackled numerous issues, most recent of which have been drug interactions, getting the dose right, candidate selection, and biomarkers (Lesko et al., 2000; Rolan et al., 2003; Stanski et al., 2005; Tucker et al., 2001). Over a course of 3 productive days, the meeting on "Effective Integration of Systems Biology, Biomarkers, Biosimulation and Modelling in Streamlining Drug Development", held in Basel, Switzerland was jointly sponsored by EUFEPS, European Biosimulation Network of Excellence (BioSim), American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP), European Centre of Pharmaceutical Medicine (ECPM), and Swiss Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences (SGRW). The meeting was focused on emerging aspects related to the quantitative understanding of underlying pathways in drug discovery and clinical development, i.e. moving from an empirical to a model-based, quantitative drug development process. The objectives of the meeting were: (1) to highlight the current state of the art on biomarkers (as they relate to quantitative fingerprinting of disease), systems biology, modelling and simulation; (2) to illustrate the applications of these emerging tools in increasing the efficiency and productivity of new drug development by case examples; (3) to understand the gaps in the technology and organizational implementations in governance, and (4) allow an opportunity for cross-disciplinary interaction, i.e., scientists with more theoretical and technical modelling and simulation expertise of the BioSim network and researchers experienced in applying modelling and simulation techniques in day-to-day drug development were drawn together. This report summarizes the outcome from this meeting.