In 2008, the FDA released guidance for drug metabolite safety testing (MIST), emphasizing the importance of metabolite toxicity testing in the drug development process. Indeed, drug toxicity, which accounts for roughly 40% of clinical drug failures, is a leading cause of the high drug attrition rates that have contributed to the skyrocketing drug development costs witnessed over the past few decades.

Traditionally, drug metabolites have been both difficult and hugely expensive to synthesize. Conventional methods of metabolite synthesis, such as those that employ the use of microsomes (while they have proven valuable as a predictive tool, their productive capabilities could be limited by NCE stability) or synthetic chemistry, can be extremely costly and time consuming. Consequently, drugmakers often choose to forego metabolite synthesis (and subsequent metabolite toxicity testing ) early on in the drug development process, opting instead to wait until lead compounds are further along in development before carrying out these essential functions. This decision, perceived to be a calculated risk, ultimately comes at huge price, as drug makers lose millions each year on investments in lead drug candidates that eventually turn out to be failures due to toxicity.

Biomimetic Chemistry, on the other hand, possesses the advantages of both chemistry and biology and is thus a much more efficient tool for metabolite synthesis. In fact, with biomimetic chemistry, large scale metabolite generation is enabled in one step, by mimicking and optimizing the same biotransformation reactions that occur in the liver. [Read more…]