Systems drug discovery: a quantitative, objective approach for safer drug development.

We are currently witnessing a dramatic change in the pharmaceutical industry as many companies are downscaling their efforts to discover new drug candidates and are instead turning toward collaboration with academic partners. This trend has been dubbed open innovation. The reason for this change of policy stems from the realization that, in spite of massive investments in their drug development programs in the past 30 years, the number of new drugs reaching the market has remained stable over the same period. We review past and present drug discovery strategies and present a novel more holistic approach that we term Systems Drug Discovery. This approach aims at quantifying the physiological state of organ slice cultures using high content imaging and metabolomics. The characterization in a quantitative manner of healthy, diseased, and drug-treated tissues will allow defining a multiparametric space, within which tissues are healthy. This in turn will allow an objective assessment of the impact of candidate drugs on cells. This quantitative approach should help guide the development of new drugs reducing failure rates in clinical phase.