Empowered Patient Podcast Molecular Characterization of Diseases Accelerates Drug Discovery Through Approval with Dr. Jonathan Usuka Sapient
Dr. Jonathan Usuka, CEO of Sapient, uses insights about proteomics and metabolomics to provide deep molecular characterization of diseases from a single sample to support drug discovery, development, and approval. The company's unique dataset combines real-world data with longitudinal molecular profiling of tens of thousands of samples across different diseases, ethnicities, genders, and ages. By measuring proteins and metabolites, this data and insights engine helps pharmaceutical companies gain a significantly more comprehensive view of the molecular basis of disease, better understand drug targets, and predict potential drug outcomes and safety.
Jonathan explains, "We support drug discovery and drug development, and a couple of things are going on in the industry right now in discovery and development. One is the overall pharma landscape of how a drug gets approved. That's been fairly static since the 1970s with the creation of the FDA. So clinical trials are well established, but the structure of it was based around not knowing much about the underlying drug target that your drug is interacting with. Since then, they've tightened up the requirements around mechanisms of action, but mostly, the process itself is almost protein agnostic in terms of the development process and how the drug interacts with patients."
"So what we do, what has happened recently, is a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of disease and how the therapeutics interact with it at a molecular level. We support pharmaceutical companies in understanding the safety and the efficacy and being able to predict how their therapies will do in the clinic, and then really understanding a lot more about the available drug targets, which expands the arsenal of ways to fight disease."
"At Sapient, we don't just identify dynamic biomarkers, biomarkers that change with disease or change in response to therapy. We also give a lot of context about those biomarkers. We also say where we have seen those biomarkers occur and how they have changed in response to other therapies, disease conditions, and immunological responses. So, a pharma company can see better what it's getting into when it invests in a dynamic biomarker."
#SapientBio #Multiomics #Proteomics #Metabotomics #DarkProteome #BeyondtheGenome #Plasmaproteomics #Biomarkers