Drug Discovery

 

A More Innovative Model of Drug Discovery is Critical

 

The cost of drug development is doubling every 9 years.  These costs are unsustainable for the healthcare system.  Currently it takes over 15 years and over 1.5 billion US dollars to bring a drug to market.  Also, the failure rate of drug development, which includes all phases of clinical trial is 90 percent.

 

The conventional approach in drug development involves drug library development, identification of validated drug targets, drug screening using establishing cell lines to identify hit to lead, in vivo testing in small animal models and lastly human testing.  However, this approach has not been successful in predicting drug efficacy and safety.

 

CET has developed a full-service workflow of producing patient and disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) for preclinical drug discovery and for patient stratification in clinical trials.

 

CET's Unique Work Flow and iPSC Technology

 

CET has raised the bar in iPSC reprogramming by offering customers the first virus-free and oncogene-free iPSC reprogramming technology.  The use of viruses and current oncogenes (c-Myc and Lin28) can introduce disruptive viral and oncogenic alterations that could distort the native biology of iPSC models in drug discovery.  CET has developed a robust reprogramming system using an episomal expression system.  The system is very robust and has several advantages over current iPSC reprogramming technologies.  CET converts targets cells into pluripotent colonies faster and more efficiently with adherent cells and circulating mononuclear cells in which the latter have been pretreated with CET's hematopoietic differentiation media. Our media fully reprograms all colonies regardless of whether oncogenes (c-Myc and Lin28) are deleted in the reprogramming scheme.  This media will substantially reduce the cost and time of iPSC reprogramming and provide the most native patient and disease-specific iPSC models.  This technology has been validated in a recent peer-reviewed publication.

 

CET can provide a full range of services for clients to produce patient and disease-specific iPSC cell models.  These services include: patient recruitment, IRB support, tissue procurement and virus-free and oncogene-free iPSC reprogramming.  We remove the burden to the customer by serving as a one-stop shop in the cell model development process.