The understanding of drug-related toxicity in early stages of development is one of the key issues for better drug development. Despite the usefulness of pharmaco-genomics in the drug development process, it remains largely an expensive and cumbersome process for drug-induced toxicity studies. This is partly due to the large number of clinical samples required and complicated statistical methodologies employed for the pharmacogenomic studies of drug-induced adverse effects.
As shown in the past, integration of data from genotype, gene expression and drug sensitivity is able to identify genetic variants critical in drug-related toxicity. Although informative, such methods use a large number of cell lines and clinical samples due to the limits of conventional gene expression and genotyping analyses.
To overcome these shortcomings ExpressGenotyping™ technology was developed jointly with the group of Prof. Aburatani and Prof. Ishikawa (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo).
ExpressGenotyping™ can efficiently and genome-widely explore and pick up candidate Biomarker SNPs which may affect drug kinetics, efficacy, and toxicity in the human body.