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Genomics drugs in clinical trials

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 9, page 988 (2010)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 February 2011

This article has been updated

Ten years ago, a first draft of the sequence of the human genome was announced, amid promises of better drugs to come through improved understanding of disease, as highlighted by Kramer and Cohen (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 3, 965–972; 2004)1. However, the tone of some recent commentaries reflects disappointment with the perceived outcome2,3. We believe that an objective discussion of this important topic has been hampered by both a lack of clarity about what constitutes a genomics drug and a lack of visibility of important genomics contributions to drug discovery. For example, recent articles have highlighted belimumab, a monoclonal antibody (mAb) that targets B lymphocyte stimulator (BLYS; also known as TNFSF13B/BAFF), as having life-altering potential for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)4, but have failed to mention its clear-cut genomics origins.

We therefore searched the clinical pipelines of several genomics companies using the Thomson Reuters Integrity database and literature resources for drugs in which genomics data — for example, from sequencing, database mining, expression profiling or RNA-interference screening — seems to have had an essential role; that is, in the absence of the genomics data, a project would probably not have been initiated or progressed. As the drug development timeline is typically 10–15 years, we limited the search to drugs that are in Phase II or III trials. Here, we highlight 12 drugs that illustrate the wide-ranging impact of essential genomics data to drug discovery (Table 1). Subjective judgment was often needed during the selection, especially in cases in which pre-existing literature linked a target to the disease prior to genomics experiments.

Table 1 Selected genomics drugs in clinical development
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Change history

  • 28 January 2011

    One of the authors' names — Katja Walther — was misspelt and has been corrected in the online version.

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Acknowledgements

M. Hirsch for Thomson Reuters Integrity technical support; W. Wishart, M. Labow, J. van Oostrum and E. Zass for useful discussions.

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Author notes

  1. All authors are at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.

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  1. Jonathan Hall

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  1. Jonathan Hall
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  2. Patrick Dennler
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  3. Stephanie Haller
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Correspondence to Jonathan Hall.

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Hall, J., Dennler, P., Haller, S. et al. Genomics drugs in clinical trials. Nat Rev Drug Discov 9, 988 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd1552-c1

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