According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 'developing new scientific approaches to detecting, understanding, predicting and preventing adverse events' was a critical path to the future of drug safety. This book brings together a collection of state-of-the-art chapters, written by experts in the drug safety field. It provides information on the present knowledge of drug side effects and their mitigation strategy during drug discovery, gives guidance for risk assessment and promotes evidence-based toxicology. Each specific area of toxicology relevant for drug discovery is discussed in detail, including theory, experimental approaches and data interpretation supported by comprehensive up-to-date references. Many chapters provide fascinating case studies, which are of general interest for those who have basic science training and are interested in how chemicals interact with the human body.

Ein moderner integrierter Ansatz für die Sicherheitsprüfung in der Arzneimittelentwicklung: Dieses Praktikerbuch behandelt In-silico- und In-vitro-Methoden sowie den Einsatz von Biomarkern, mit denen bei kleinen Arzneistoffmolekülen und Biologika frühzeitig und zuverlässig Toxizitäts-Screenings durchgeführt werden können.

As a guide for pharmaceutical professionals to the issues and practices of drug discovery toxicology, this book integrates and reviews the strategy and application of tools and methods at each step of the drug discovery process. • Guides researchers as to what drug safety experiments are both practical and useful • Covers a variety of key topics – safety lead optimization, in vitro-in vivo translation, organ toxicology, ADME, animal models, biomarkers, and –omics tools • Describes what experiments are possible and useful and offers a view into the future, indicating key areas to watch for new predictive methods • Features contributions from firsthand industry experience, giving readers insight into the strategy and execution of predictive toxicology practices

The new field of toxicogenomics presents a potentially powerful set of tools to better understand the health effects of exposures to toxicants in the environment. At the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Research Council assembled a committee to identify the benefits of toxicogenomics, the challenges to achieving them, and potential approaches to overcoming such challenges. The report concludes that realizing the potential of toxicogenomics to improve public health decisions will require a concerted effort to generate data, make use of existing data, and study data in new waysâ€"an effort requiring funding, interagency coordination, and data management strategies.

The sophistication of modelling and simulation technologies have improved dramatically over the past decade and their applications in toxicity prediction and risk assessment are of critical importance. The integration of predictive toxicology approaches will become increasingly necessary as industrial chemicals advance and as new pharmaceuticals enter the market. In this comprehensive discussion of predictive toxicology and its applications, leading experts express their views on the technologies currently available and the potential for future developments. The book covers a wide range of topics including in silico, in vitro and in vivo approaches that are being used in the safety assessment of chemical substances. It reflects the growing and urgent need to strengthen and improve our ability to predict the safety and risks posed by industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals in humans. The reader will find extensive information on the use of current animal models used for various toxicities and target mediated toxicities. Also discussed are the recent regulatory initiatives to improve the safety assessment of chemicals. The book provides an expert and comprehensive discussion on the current status and future directions of predictive toxicology and its application. The various chapters in the book also reflect the growing need for improvements in our technologies and abilities to predict toxicities of pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals to ensure product safety and protect public health.

In recent years, the costs of new drug development have skyrocketed. The average cost of developing a new approved drug is now estimated to be $1.3 billion (DiMasi and Grabowski, 2007). At the same time, each year fewer new molecular entities (NMEs) are approved. DiMasi and Grabowski report that only 21.5 percent of the candidate drugs that enter phase I clinical testing actually make it to market. In 2007, just 17 novel drugs and 2 novel biologics were approved. In addition to the slowing rate of drug development and approval, recent years have seen a number of drugs withdrawn from the market for safety reasons. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 10 drugs were withdrawn because of safety concerns between 2000 and March 2006 (GAO, 2006). Finding ways to select successful drug candidates earlier in development could save millions or even billions of dollars, reduce the costs of drugs on the market, and increase the number of new drugs with improved safety profiles that are available to patients. Emerging scientific knowledge and technologies hold the potential to enhance correct decision making for the advancement of candidate drugs. Identification of safety problems is a key reason that new drug development is stalled. Traditional methods for assessing a drug's safety prior to approval are limited in their ability to detect rare safety problems. Prior to receiving U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, a drug will have been tested in hundreds to thousands of patients. Generally, drugs cannot confidently be linked to safety problems until they have been tested in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. With current methods, it is unlikely that rare safety problems will be identified prior to approval. Emerging Safety Science: Workshop Summary summarizes the events and presentations of the workshop.

A. N. WORDEN, D. V. PARKE AND J. MARKS THE BACKGROUND There is nothing new about the fact that chemical substances derived either from natural products or by synthetic means .. can give rise to toxicity in animals and human beings, and that they must be subjected to controls. The earliest writings speak of such toxicity and, from the times of ancient Egypt and in the Old Tes tament, controls have existed[l]. In the Middle Ages Paracelsus (1493-1541) noted that "All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing a poison", and hence he stressed the importance of dose relative to toxic reactions [ 2] . Most of the early controls concentrated on substances that were to be deliberately administered to the human subject in the form of medicines. Legislation for many centuries was mainly con cerned with regulating the activities of apothecaries and physicians. The Royal College of Physicians, for example, was originally established to control the activities of physicians within London. Among the controls which it exerted was that over the use of medicinal substances. Such controls were, however, poor, based as they were on hearsay evidence of toxicity. For many centuries no means existed for the accurate determination of toxicity.