Biomarker discovery will play an increasingly important role in the future of drug discovery and development in a wide variety of applications across the pharmaceutical industry.
For example:
- Developing diagnostic tools for specific diseases
- Monitoring of disease progression
- Measuring the responsiveness of a given subject to a drug treatment
- Revealing toxic effects due to drug-induced hepatic injury earlier on (hepatotoxicity)
- Identifying patients at risk of side effects
- Providing surrogate endpoints for clinical trials
- Stratifying patients for clinical trials and helping elucidate metabolic pathways in normal and pathological states
Tessella has been working on a number of different projects with large pharmaceutical companies in the area of Biomarkers; one involving image handling investigating the suitability of immunohistochemistry for biomarker identification. We are also developing a biomarker database; compiling biomarker information from many different data formats, and then linking the biomarker data up with the discovery data (genomic, proteomic, etc).
Tessella has also implemented a number of systems for the collection and analysis of clinical trials data, including the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). One of the challenges has been to develop an effective means of presenting the results of multivariate data analysis to clinicians. Our experience of developing 3D visualization techniques for scientific data provided some useful advances in this area. Tessella’s scientific understanding allowed us to work closely with the client to create sophisticated solutions to a very complex problem. Ultimately, the aim is to develop more effective clinical trials which will reduce costs and maximize patient safety.
