Phenotypic Assays in Cancer Drug Discovery

The topic of phenotypic screening has come up around here many times, as indeed it comes up very often in drug discovery. Give your compounds to cells or to animals and look for the effect you want: what could be simpler? Well, a lot of things could, as anyone who's actually done this sort of screening will be glad to tell you, but done right, it's a very powerful technique. It's also true that a huge amount of industrial effort is going into cancer drug discovery, so you'd think that there would be a natural overlap between these: see if your compounds kill or slow cancer cells, or tumors in an animal, and you're on track, right? But there's a huge disconnect here, and that's the subject of a new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. (Full disclosure: one of the authors is a former colleague, and I had a chance to look over the manuscript while it was being prepared). Here's the hard part: Among the factors contributing to the growing interest in phenotypic screening in drug discovery in general is the perception that, by avoiding oversimplified reductionist assumptions regarding molecular targets and instead focusing on functional effects, compounds that are discovered in phenotypic assays may be more likely to show clinical efficacy. However, cancer presents a challenge to this perception as the cell-based models that are typically used in cancer drug discovery are poor surrogates of the actual disease. The definitive test of both target hypotheses and phenotypic model...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs