Modern medicine has made great strides in recent decades. The promises of biotechnology and advances in gene identification and manipulation offer tremendous potential for treatment of disease. However, developing new drug therapies by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies is still a very costly and time consuming process. One of the important milestones in drug development is the successful completion of preclinical evaluation. During this phase, drug candidates must be shown to be safe, yet effective as a treatment of the target disease or disorder. Critical for preclinical testing is the availability of biomedical test models that adequately mimic the target disease. A good model will 1) allow confident prediction of a drug’s effects before expensive clinical trials are begun, 2) provide convincing data for use in an FDA new drug application and 3) minimize the time required for testing. Space flight may offer a completely unique and new set of biomedical models for use in pharmaceutical testing. This paper highlights some examples of recent experiments done in space to test new compounds for Chiron, (Emmeryville, CA) and discusses the importance of the International Space Station to greatly expand such commercial opportunities.
Benefits attained from space flight in pre-clinical evaluation of candidate drugs
Space technology and applications international forum - 1998 ; 1998 ; Albuquerque,New Mexico (USA)
AIP Conference Proceedings ; 420 , 1 ; 627-632
1998-01-15
6 pages
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Benefits Attained from Space Flight in Pre-Clinical Evaluation of Candidate Drugs
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1998
|The soaring flight of birds attained mechanically
Engineering Index Backfile | 1908
|Instantaneous speed of plane in flight determined from that attained on ground
Engineering Index Backfile | 1929
|Benefits of manned space flight
SLUB | 1985
|