There are thousands of kinds of toxicity, and, ideally, the pharma industry would like to be able to identify every potential toxicity for every potential new drug molecule during the earliest stages of drug discovery, before spending substantial resources to develop these new drug molecules.
The collaboration aims to significantly accelerate the drug development process by combining Affymetrix' GeneChip microarray technology with Iconix' DrugMatrix 640 compound reference database and analysis software.
Using such tools, researchers will be able to quickly compare gene expression profiles to the Iconix' Drug Signatures library to help predict the impact that gene expression changes may have on biological pathways critical to the body's toxic response to drugs.
"The new paradigm will streamline steps required to put gene expression data into the context of toxicology," said Don Halbert, executive vice president of Research and Development at Iconix Pharmaceuticals.
"Arming pharmaceutical companies with the fullest available chemogenomic and pharmacologic data is expected to enable candidate prioritisation and move development decisions earlier in the drug development process," he added.
Because there's no such thing as a safe medication, the question is how to reduce the toxic complications that are characteristic of virtually every drug on the market today.
The pharmaceutical industry has identified two solutions to this problem. One is to have personalised medicine, putting the problem on the patient and not the drug, so the premise is that you have to pre-screen, using genetic markers to figure out those people least likely to show side effects and then only give the drug to those people.
Another way to look at the problem with the drug, a tricky problem since studies into drug toxicity haven't been well-funded in terms of scientific studies to get drugs to be safer.
Adverse drug effects are estimated to be the 5th or 6thcause of illness and death in the US. Costs estimates range between 30 - 150 billion a year. Adverse drug effects account for up to 7 per cent of hospitalisations in US