Pharma R&D Annual Review 2010
Top mechanisms of action (pharmacologies) - few changes
Table 4 shows the Top 20 mechanisms of action (pharmacologies) employed by drugs in the May 2010 R&D pipeline. This table is, as ever, dominated by the broader categories used in the classification and is headed by the general 'Immunostimulant' category which is applied to most vaccine programmes. Following on from this are three categories in the top five which encompass a range of anticancer drug development strategies: Angiogenesis inhibitors, Apoptosis stimulants and Cell cycle inhibitors. The mechanism of action classification we use has undergone considerable revision and improvement this year, but despite this, there is very little movement in the table. The total number of mechanisms of action in use in the database now stands at 2,131, up very slightly from 2,122 last year.
A better measure of the level of innovation in drug development strategies can be gleaned from looking at the number of protein targets which drugs are designed to act upon, and particularly how this figure has changed in the past year. This now stands at 1,849, indicating that 97 new drug protein targets have been identified in the past twelve months. This is comparable to the previous year's increase of 102 new targets. So although there is no slowdown in innovation as measured by this metric, the once-expected surge in new targets which it was hoped would follow on from the completion of the Human Genome Project still seems to be waiting in the wings.
