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Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 10, page 712 (2011) Cite this article

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A recent report by Arrowsmith noted that the success rates for new development projects in Phase II trials have fallen from 28% to 18% in recent years, with insufficient efficacy being the most frequent reason for failure (Phase II failures: 2008–2010. Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 10, 328–329 (2011))1. This indicates the limitations of the predictivity of disease models and also that the validity of the targets being investigated is frequently questionable, which is a crucial issue to address if success rates in clinical trials are to be improved.

Candidate drug targets in industry are derived from various sources, including in-house target identification campaigns, in-licensing and public sourcing, in particular based on reports published in the literature and presented at conferences. During the transfer of projects from an academic to a company setting, the focus changes from 'interesting' to 'feasible/marketable', and the financial costs of pursuing a full-blown drug discovery and development programme for a particular target could ultimately be hundreds of millions of Euros. Even in the earlier stages, investments in activities such as high-throughput screening programmes are substantial, and thus the validity of published data on potential targets is crucial for companies when deciding to start novel projects.

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Figure 1: Analysis of the reproducibility of published data in 67 in-house projects.
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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank B. Kreft and T. Zollner for their valuable contributions to this project, S. Schoepe for support in the data analysis and S. Decker for support with bioinformatics analysis of the results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florian Prinz is at Target Research Berlin, Bayer HealthCare, Müllerstraße 178, 13342 Berlin, Germany.,

    Florian Prinz

  2. Thomas Schlange is at Target Research Wuppertal, Bayer HealthCare, Aprather Weg 18a, 42096 Wuppertal, Germany.,

    Thomas Schlange

  3. Khusru Asadullah is Vice President and Head of Target Discovery at Bayer HealthCare, Müllerstraße 178, 13342 Berlin, Germany.,

    Khusru Asadullah

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  1. Florian Prinz
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  2. Thomas Schlange
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  3. Khusru Asadullah
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Correspondence to Khusru Asadullah.

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Prinz, F., Schlange, T. & Asadullah, K. Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?. Nat Rev Drug Discov 10, 712 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3439-c1

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