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Why does drug discovery fail?
Drug discovery is a long and laborious process, with a high chance of failure, especially during later stages of the development where the cost of R&D skyrockets.
On average:
>90%
of drugs failed to get an approval
>10years
from discovery to market
>$1bn
spent on R&D per drug
Drugs work differently in different people, but the current drug development pipeline does not account for this. In clinical trials, variable efficacy and toxicity are leading reasons for trial failures. Whether it’s gender, ethnicity, or other genetic differences, human variation is not part of drug development.
Accounting for genetic diversity in drug discovery
At present, the concept of precision medicine has been implemented in drug delivery mainly by varying drug dosing regime for individual patients. R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, however, still largely employs a traditional research strategy that ignores the contribution of human diversity on variable drug responses. The result is a high level of expensive, late-stage failures to bring new drugs to the market.
TartanCell has developed a platform that detects and explains variable drug responses to support pharma R&D programs and explain and inform clinical trial construction and outcome. For the first time, our platform delivers precision drug discovery.
The TartanCell Platform
Our patent-pending platform screens the drug-treated human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) at scale and identifies the variations in responses between each hiPSC when treated with the same drug. The TartanCell platform can be integrated seamlessly to the existing R&D pipeline and provide an insight to how different people may react differently when treated with the same drug.
The TartanCell platform (patent pending) enables, for the first time, a detection of variable drug responses in pre-clinical assays and thus allows our pharma partners to predict variable drug responses early in the drug development process.
The TartanCell Platform improves pipeline success and lower cost by reducing failure rates.
| Conventional R&D | With TartanCell Platform | |
| Detect variation in responses | During late clinical trials | Before trial begins |
| Setup clinical trial based on... | Pre-clinical data (from in vitro studies) | Pre-clinical data and anticipated response variation in different people |
| Resources wasted on failed trial | High If the variation was detected in a late stage trial | Reduced Trial could be terminated early based on the response data |
| Construct trial specifically for stratified cohort | No | Possible |
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