How Experimental Medicine Is Affecting Big Pharma

Big Pharma is rethinking the clinical trials process, establishing tighter links between clinical R&D and discovery. The buzzword is experimental medicine--a catchall for the set of tools and clinical strategies used to determine whether hitting a drug target modulates a disease process in a therapeutically useful way. By so doing, companies hope to reign in clinical costs--the bulk of drug development expenses--by avoiding massive drilling into what prove to be dry drug development holes. To some, experimental medicine is also a process to create a bridge between discovery research and clinical R&D--a large task given that they hold different mindsets.