Screening


Will data from new healthcare technologies improve drug discovery?


By Paul Avery, Managing Director and Katharine Steer, PR Account Director, BioStrata


F


itbits and other healthcare technologies have made their way on to wrists and smart phones in drug discovery laboratories worldwide. Beyond improving the health of individual scientists, is there a role for this tech- nology and the data it generates in the arsenal of drug discovery? Colleagues in drug development have started to collect data from volunteers and patients in clinical trials through wearable technologies, phones and tablets. The pharmaceutical industry is also aware that healthcare technologies could improve patient care and monitoring for drugs post-authorisation. This is typified by the collaborations on smart inhalers that have been announced between technology firms and (separately) GlaxoSmithKline, Boehringer Ingelheim and Novartis. With more sophisticated healthcare technologies being forecast, in the future drugs may be routinely administered through smart medical devices. This tech- nology could also be implanted permanently in patients or worn more tem- porarily, for example in wound dressings.


While these scenarios are still to be realised, data collected could be of sig- nificance for drug discovery. Scientists could be active participants in the devel- opment of future healthcare technologies to ensure opportunities are not missed: without this input, technology companies will not know which data are of value and how these can best be disseminated.


Reverse translation is already reliant on the flow of information between clinical and research teams, in order to identify new disease states and under- stand disease progression. In the future, reverse translation could also involve engineers working in partnership with drug discovery groups and clinicians to optimise healthcare technology devices. Fortunately, collaboration and engagement are priorities for technology companies such as Arm, the world’s leading semiconductor IP company. Peter Ferguson, Arm’s director of healthcare technologies, concludes: “Arm is collab- orating with drug discovery and delivery partners to develop cost-effective, low-power technologies that will enable smart, connected devices, ultimately leading to improved care and clinical outcomes.”


screen, the increased adoption of automated, high- throughput flow cytometric applications looks set to continue.


“Over the next few years I believe we will see continued growth of fully-automated flow cytome- try solutions, minimising operator influence and thereby minimising assay variations,” says Dr Martin Büscher, Head of Biophysics at Miltenyi Biotec. “At Miltenyi Biotec, we’re working hard to come up with novel automated solutions that will open up new options in high-throughput flow cytometry and will advance drug discovery appli- cations across the field.”


Büscher believes that one of the biggest chal- lenges will be convincing users to trust fully-auto- mated solutions to do the job they have been doing manually for years. Ultimately, the time savings that high-throughput automation will bring and continued improvements in the reproducibility and reliability of flow cytometry data will play a key role in accelerating this transition.


Conclusion


Flow cytometry is an invaluable technique for the analysis of cell populations, and recent advances in instrument throughput and automation are enabling its wider use for a range of high-through- put drug discovery applications. The latest com- mercial machines are capable of measuring large numbers of parameters at impressive rates of tens of thousands of cells per second. Automated sam- ple handling systems are simplifying workflows and making it possible to screen tens of thousands of compounds, and more, in a robust and resource- efficient manner.


DDW


Paul Avery is Managing Director and Richard Massey is a Science Writer at BioStrata, a life sci- ence specialist marketing agency. Its growing team in Cambridge (UK) and Boston (US) includes a sig- nificant number of people with deep scientific experience and knowledge. The agency offers everything from strategy, branding and message development through to creative, technical, digital, social media and PR execution.


38 Drug Discovery World Winter 2017/18


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