GIVING people drugs before they have been thoroughly tested in animals sounds like madness. But it could help speed up drug development.
The idea, called microdosing, is to give volunteers tiny doses of potential drugs that pose no health risk but reveal where and when a substance goes in the body and how fast it is broken down. 鈥淚t avoids selection of compounds that look good in animals but end up useless,鈥� says Jeremy Hague of Xceleron, a UK-based company offering microdosing services.
The approach is attracting increasing interest from the pharmaceutical industry, as 40 per cent of potential drugs fail when first tested in people. But does microdosing really reflect what happens with normal, much larger doses? If not, researchers might discard potential drugs that would have worked at full dose.
Advertisement
To find out, a consortium of companies has sponsored a trial in which volunteers were microdosed with four drugs already tested in humans at the full dose. The drugs were labelled with carbon-14, making it possible to track their fate using mass spectrometry. 鈥淲e analyse blood, plasma, urine, faeces, hair, sweat, even cells, to see what happens to the drug, whether it gets to the right place in the right amount at the right time,鈥� says Hague.
For three of the four drugs tested, the microdosing results accurately reflect what happens at normal doses, Xceleron announced last week, even though the compounds chosen were ones for which microdosing was considered least likely to succeed.
