Emerging technologies for prediction of drug candidate efficacy in the preclinical pipeline

The pharmaceutical industry is tackling increasingly complex multifactorial diseases, resulting in increases in research & development (R&D) costs and reductions in the success rates for drug candidates during Phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, with a lack of efficacy being the primary reason for drug candidate failure. This implies that the predictive power of current preclinical assays for drug candidate efficacy is suboptimal and, therefore, that alternatives should be developed. Here, I review emerging in vitro, imaging, and in silico technologies and discuss their potential contribution to drug efficacy assessment. Importantly, these technologies are complimentary and can be bundled into the preclinical platform. In particular, patient-on-a-chip recapitulates both human genetics and physiology. The response of a patient-on-a-chip to drug candidate treatment is monitored with light-sheet fluorescent microscopy and fed into the image-analysis pipeline to reconstruct an image-based systems-level model for disease pathophysiology and drug candidate mode of action. Thus, such models could be useful tools for assessing drug candidate efficacy and safety in humans.