CryoEM for Drug Discovery

Understand important upcoming milestones that will impact the likelihood of drug approval or future sales potential for key therapies during a free webinar from Informa Pharma Intelligence, "Q4 Outlook Webinar - Key Catalysts and their Impact on Pharma Markets". During this important session, experts from the Datamonitor Healthcare team, part of the Commercial Strategy Suite at Pharma Intelligence, presented their insights into what to expect during the last quarter of the year.

Manufacturing has been paid dividends for many years through the use of quality tools such as statistical process control, quality function deployment, vendor audit management, hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP), value stream analysis, and other valuation methods. In the highly regulated industries that manufacture pharmaceuticals, foods, and cosmetics, the quality control ‘scientists’ have been typically known to perform sampling and testing for determining the acceptability of finished products. During the past decade, the pharmaceutical industry has seen a significant regulator-industry aligned paradigm change and an important leap into the formality of quality improvement using quality tools. The paradigm of final product testing (and the myth of ‘testing quality into products’) has been challenged by both the industry and regulators. Recent industry and regulatory support of ‘risk-based’ concepts and principles are intended to produce a ‘desired state’ of industry development and production of pharmaceuticals that have a higher level of consistency in meeting purity, safety, and efficacy than in prior history.

Gain insights from an assay development expert as Dr. David Baker, of AstraZeneca, discusses how you can enable rapid measurement of cell proliferation, transfection efficiency, cell confluence and other cellular characteristics for assay optimization using live-cell imaging and high throughput flow cytometry. Establishing the characteristics of cell models is a key component of assay optimization processes performed at AstraZeneca. Learn how to use longitudinal live-cell imaging assays to characterize cells for assay development and assay endpoints. Examples will include how to measure cell confluence and assess the proliferation rate of different cell types to establish optimal assay conditions to screen for cytostatic or cytotoxic compounds in cancer cell lines.

Incorporation of patient-focused drug design principles is increasingly becoming essential to ensure that a new drug is commercially successful and delivers the best patient outcomes. Often, patient factors and insights are not considered or discovered until the later phases of drug development when dose form, dose strength, and route of administration are already decided. There is tremendous potential benefit of equipping formulators and other scientists with patient insights earlier in the development process so that the drug product can be designed to address the specific needs of target patient populations.