William Mong Distinguished Lecture
by Professor Chih-Ming Ho
Mar 1, 2017
Professor Chih-Ming Ho, Ben Rich-Lockheed Martin Chair Professor at University of California at Los Angeles, gave a lecture on March 1, 2017 titled “Redefining the Drug Discovery Pathway - From Drug Candidate Search to Phenotypic Personalized Medicine (PPM)”.
The current drug development roadmaps are on the order of 10-15 years and cost billions of dollars. The two fundamental challenges that impede drug development are: 1) Conventional approaches cannot pinpoint the best drug-dose combination from a large search space. 2) The current translation of drug doses from in vitro to in vivo test is by matching the PK or by weight scaling or by the maximum tolerated dose approach, which implicitly preclude optimization.
Professor Ho's team has discovered that the drug-dose inputs are correlated with the phenotypic outputs with a Parabolic Response Surface (PRS). With a few calibration tests to determine to response surface, PRS can dictate the drugs and doses of a globally optimized drug combination at each stage of in vitro, preclinical, clinical test and even for a specific patient. PRS is an indication agnostic and mechanism free platform technology, which has been successfully demonstrated in about 30 diseases.