Home : Services : Contracted : Drug Discovery

Drug Discovery and Lead Product Generation

For most development-stage companies, the difference between success and failure hinges on the viability of the clinical and product development strategy. We recognize that each step in the process has a direct impact on corporate fundraising, technology valuations and the ability to partner or sell products and inventions. Because of investors' high expectations, impatience, and low tolerance for error, Kinexum dedicates substantial effort towards assisting early to mid-stage client companies in the development of their cutting-edge technologies where the stakes are the highest. With millions of dollars in high-risk venture funding in the balance, Kinexum believes that its approach towards integrated regulatory and clinical design and implementation can provide substantial risk reduction for client companies.

Kinexum can assist in the evaluation and development plan for newly discovered or partially developed compounds:

• Careful evaluation of problematic synthesis issues, reactive moieties, under-recognized class toxicities, intellectual property restraints
• Sophisticated regulatory strategies for both FDA and other major authorities
• Access to funding, licensing, partnerships
• Integrated clinical development plan

The people of Kinexum routinely harness cutting edge science, but they also understand its limitations and pitfalls. Even in the age of high-throughput screening, genomics, computer-aided combinatorial and trial design and state of the art electronic communication, understanding how to apply tools is just as important as the tools themselves. Kinexum's team members embrace technological change and the challenges it presents. At Kinexum, we are energized not only by helping clients adjust to shifts in the established paradigms but in enabling them to cause these shifts.

Kinexum's perspective of drug discovery today:

• Drug discovery is a multidisciplinary, complex, and "fluid" activity, that is difficult to industrialize
• The input-output gap of pharmaceutical research began to widen with the industrialization of the process
• The dilemma of "molecular medicine" is that living organisms cannot be adequately explained on the basis of their building blocks, just as the properties of a molecule cannot sufficiently be explained on he basis of the properties of its individual atoms
• Drug discovery will more likely succeed when the complexity of living systems is taken into account
• "Each drug on the market today made its own way - not by following a standard pattern of development"
• "The development of most existing successful drugs has key features at odds with present industrial view of drug development"  (Nature Reviews, March 2003, p 167)
• Since the beginning of the industrialization of the process, the cumulative discovery attrition rate from target identification to Proof of Concept in man has grown to 85%
• Main reasons of failure are:
• Focus on targets as opposed to pathways
• Lack of understanding of the "target"
• Inability to find a chemical lead
• Toxicity
• Lack of efficacy (insufficient benefit to the patient)

Copyright © 2004 Kinexum LLC | terms of use | privacy