Robust Solution Holds Potential for Drug Discovery

During his plenary address on ‘Opportunities in the Golden Age of Biology’ at the 2018 European Laboratory Research & Innovation Group (ELRIG) Drug Discovery Conference, life science entrepreneur Dr Jonathan Milner, Deputy Chairman and Founder of Abcam, questioned whether the use of current animal model cell lines could be a significant factor behind the apparent ‘broken’ process in drug discovery. Pointing out that human cell lines, although limited in availability, could offer better outcomes in drug discovery, he mentioned that one particular company, Cambridge University spin-out Elpis Biomed could offered viable human cell alternatives.

Dr Milner explained: “Over the past decades, the return on investment on pharmaceutical research and development has suffered exponential decline. A main contributor to the rising costs of drug development are high failure rates, both at the pre-clinical and clinical stage.” He continued: “The causes for drug failure are likely due to the biological differences between the current animal models and cell lines used for drug discovery and human biology. The solution to this problem is to integrate human cell models early into the drug development process.”

“The lack of human cell models being utilised boils down to the fact that the current technology for generating patient derived cells does not meet the requirements for drug screening.” Elpis, backed by Milner’s personal investment, “provides the first robust and scalable solution of functional biologically-relevant cells for drug development,” he added.

Further technical details of Elpis’s OPTi-OX platform are described in the peer-reviewed paper by Pawlowski et at, entitled Pluripotent Stem Cells into Neurons, Skeletal Myocytes, and Oligodendrocytes in Stem Cell Reports, 2017, 8 (4):803-812.