Interest in biomarkers has exploded in recent years, driven by improvements in data collection and analysis, burgeoning interest in personalized medicine, and efforts to increase the success rate for drug development. Although biomarkers were historically used as diagnostic tools, today they span every aspect of healthcare, such as predicting disease risk, monitoring disease progression, and assessing treatment response. They are also used by drug developers to streamline a path into the clinic.
In the drug discovery process, biomarkers can facilitate the investigation of a disease’s or drug’s mechanism of action, the selection of a specific patient population, and the assessment of each patient’s response. Overall, they make clinical trials more precise and cost-effective while reducing side effects, leading to better patient outcomes and faster regulatory approvals. But it’s not all smooth sailing.
The processes of finding, validating, and analyzing biomarkers come with many challenges that drug development companies are still working to overcome. Biomarkers are often categorized by their intended uses. For example, pharmacodynamic biomarkers, which measure the effects of a drug on a target, include phosphoproteins, which serve as key biomarkers in cancer signaling pathways.
However, if there isn’t a well-established biomarker for a particular role, or if the current biomarkers are insufficient to perform a certain task, companies must look for a new one. Accordin.