AstraZeneca pioneers safe drug testing

AstraZeneca has been named as a company that is helping to revolutionise the way drug trials in humans are carried out.

Earlier this year, the disastrous trial of TGN1412, a TeGenero drug, resulted in the hospitalisation of six patients. As a result, TeGenero entered insolvency while expressing concern over the “major challenges” that faced pharmaceutical companies in trying to trial new drugs safely in human patients for the first time.

However, researchers from the University of Southampton working with AstraZeneca scientists have developed a new technique for testing new drugs on people, called microdosing.

The method involves giving people miniscule amounts of a new drug to try and lessen the types of reaction seen in the TGN1412 trial, even if the drug has been used safely in animals other than humans.

Microdosing works by infusing a drug through the skin, rather than being injected directly into a patient’s drug stream, meaning the effects of any drug that could be harmful to human physiology are likely to be localised in the area of treatment instead of causing possibly systemic reactions.

A spokesman for AstraZeneca told BBC News that the development of more human-specific drugs could be beneficial in finding new treatments for cancer or arthritis.

He said: “This is a technique that can potentially bridge the gap in some case by case examples when the biology from animals may not fully translate into the biology of humans.”

Two weeks ago, it was revealed that some of the patients in the TGN1412 trial were showing early signs of developing cancer. A report showed that the patients involved in the trial had a high risk of developing autoimmune diseases and that their T-cell levels were severely depleted, reducing their ability to fight infections, according to the Times.

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