Application of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics for new drug development

摘要

Preclinical drug discovery is a time- and labor-consuming work and unfortunately very small number of compounds can be applicable to patients. Moreover, though the cost of new drug development has been increasing for the past many years, the number of approved new drug is relatively fixed (Kola and Landis, 2004). Theoretically it is not possible to develop new drug with complete safety and high efficacy, so the pharmaceutical companies always try to pre-screen potential toxicity of drug candidates. Approximately 50% of lead compounds failed because of insufficient efficacy and 40% attrition of lead compounds is due to safety issues (DiMasi, 1995).