Drug Discovery

The SMDA Drug Discovery Working Group is building a patient-centered platform for testing drugs directly on living tumor samples. The core infrastructure for this effort is being developed through a collaboration between the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) and the College of Pharmacy (COP). CVM provides access to patient-derived samples through the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, while COP provides high-throughput drug testing robotics and pharmacology expertise. Together, these resources allow the working group to move early drug discovery beyond mice and cell lines, rapidly testing drug libraries on patient-derived organoids to identify treatments with real clinical potential.

 

 

From Patient Samples to Clinical Translation

The figure below shows the traditional drug-development timeline: drugs are designed and optimized years before they are ever tested in patient-derived disease. In many cases, the first meaningful test in real patient samples does not occur until Phase 2 clinical trials, often separated from the original chemistry by a decade or more. That means chemists may not know whether a drug works in real patients until years after the molecule was first built. SARxpress is designed to close that gap by linking the earliest stages of drug design directly to patient-derived samples, so clinical relevance is tested from the beginning rather than added at the end.

Under the CTSA One Health Alliance, COP and CVM are building a linked drug-development pipeline with Emory University. COP contributes drug-screening robotics, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology expertise, while CVM provides access to naturally occurring veterinary cancers, patient-derived samples, and veterinary clinical trials at UGA. Emory provides human oncology expertise and the pathway toward eventual human clinical investigation. The figure below illustrates this model and shows how the pipeline connects with the Bioinformatics-Diagnostics (IOB) and AI-Pathology (IAI) working groups, where bioinformatics and computer vision investigators will help develop companion genomic and histopathological diagnostics. Together, this CTSA-linked partnership creates a practical path for moving promising compounds from patient-derived testing, to veterinary trials, and ultimately toward human clinical use.

Current Members

• Eugene Douglass
• Lei Zhang
• Robert Huigens
• Yu Wang
• Jonathan Mochel
• Karin Allenspach
• Christopher Zdyrski
• Natarajan Kannan
• Aleksandra Pawlak
• Uma Signh
• Melissa Hallow

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Software Tools

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• “Normal” Properties of Drugs:: Lipinski Rules Ranges
• PK Parameters: PK Parameters of FDA-approved drugs
• Regimen Simulator: Clinical Concentrations over time

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Cleaned Datasets

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Key Performance Indicators: specific items list

 

KPI List: password protected

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