CYP Design Ltd - Producing human recombinant cytochrome P450 enzymes in human cells: room temperature stable and active microsomal preparations for high throughput drug discovery.

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Development of a new drug may take up to 14 years from the initial idea and cost close to $2 Bn. Thousands of new chemicals are tested as potential drugs for every one successfully brought to market. Early discovery work seeks to identify ones with beneficial diseasemodifying properties and to rule out ones that are toxic. New approaches are necessary to prevent drug candidates entering expensive human clinical trials unnecessarily. Animaltesting does not address the problem of toxicity, since animals often deal with chemicals quite differently. In any case, methodolgies that replace animal testing are highly desireable. A set of proteins in the human liver, CYPs, are mostly responsible for how humans deal with drugs. CYPs are available commercially but are expensive, poorly active and inconvenient to use.CYP Design Ltd (CDL) has developed processes for the production of active, stable and costeffective CYPs, which are currently produced in yeast. These products are useful for the early stages of drug discovery, when scientists are seeking to decide which of a set of new chemicals to take to the next stage of the discovery process. Of further value would be human CYPs expressed in human cells, where the environment would be closer still to that in thepatient. Results using these products may also be acceptable to the Regulatory Agencies as direct supporting evidience prior to the approval of a clinical trial with a new prospective medicine. CDL has proprietary technology that will allow it to develop new CYP products that can be used throughout the drug discovery process.