Molecular Bioprocessing as a New Paradigm for Drug Discovery

The drug discovery process is expensive and often inefficient. With the emergence of genomic and proteomic information, the growth of critical molecular targets is rapid. Nevertheless, the development of active, selective, and safe drug candidates (small molecule or biopharmaceutical) has not kept pace with such advances. For small molecules, a core problem is the lack of high-throughput and accurate methodologies for ADME/Tox, which forces comprehensive toxicology studies to be performed only on later stage lead compounds and preclinical candidates. For biopharmaceuticals, the ability to accurately reproduce the human protein with correct posttranslational modification is limited by lack of knowledge of cellular machinery and then the efficient scale up of protein production and purification. Professor Dordick will detail his research in the design and optimization of high-throughput, microscale discovery and development platforms and the emergence of using bioprocessing strategies at early stages of drug discovery.