Biotechnology companies are increasingly looking to large-scale animal studies, that can test multiple potential treatments at once, to develop new drugs, as reported in a recent article.

Currently, the discovery of new drugs is based mainly on tests on cells and tissues in the lab, which allow many compounds to be analysed and screened in one go (they are then typically assessed for safety in animals).

An article in Nature Biotechnology describes how, thanks to new affordable cell techniques, this step is now also being done in living animals. Companies are able to scale up this drug screening so that in a single animal, potentially thousands of administered therapies can be tracked for their effects on individual cells – so-called ‘multiplexed in vivo screening.’ Computation and AI make it possible to automate the process and rapidly analyse complex data.

The idea is to bring animal testing to an earlier stage of drug development to reduce costs and time, and the number of animals that may be needed to get preclinical results, as well as improve efficiency.

This is showing promise, with the US company Gordian Biotechnology reporting that 80% of targets for treating osteoarthritis, as identified by multiplex animal screening, were validated in patient tissues.

The article also describes other useful applications, including predicting how therapeutic antibodies will behave and improving the development of gene therapies.