Make Better Decisions In Drug Development

The high failure rate in drug development is a major problem. The need for more cost-effective and -efficient drug development is widely recognized but largely unmet. A proposed solution is the development of research and teaching programs in quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP), as recommended by the 2011 U.S. National Institutes of Health QSP White Paper. The cumulative expenditures of federal agencies for QSP-related funding priorities to-date readily exceed $1 billion. QSP uses computation and modeling to interpret, interrogate and integrate drug effects on multiple scales (molecule, cellular, organ, whole organism, time, space), with the goal of being able to forecast treatment outcomes. QSP is highly transdisciplinary and requires knowledge in diverse scientific fields including biology, physics, chemistry, pharmacology, pharmaceutical sciences, computational modeling, engineering, clinical sciences, and regulatory sciences. QSP skillsets are highly valued in pharmaceutical industry.