Seminar – Nicholas Clanton, PhD

Poor pharmacokinetic behavior is one of the most common reasons for early attrition of drug candidates. While common in industry, rigorous ADME/DMPK screening during medicinal chemistry campaigns is rare in academia, as such evaluation is often cost-prohibitive when outsourced to contract research organizations (CROs). As a result, many academics in drug discovery spend most of their efforts optimizing drug structure for potency, with no knowledge of a lead series’ pharmacological properties. Under this "potency first” paradigm researchers progress to animal studies with no knowledge of whether a drug is capable of engaging the target in vivo. This has led to an infamous “valley of death” in academic drug discovery in which many promising compounds are unable to progress through preclinical development due to lack of target engagement in vivo or unacceptable toxicity. The Preclinical Pharmacology Core (PPC) at the University of Texas at San Antonio was founded in 2021 to provide researchers access to ADME and DMPK studies at a fraction of the cost relative to CROs. In this time, the PPC has supported over 25 meritorious research projects and become a premier destination for ADME and DMPK assessment in South Texas and Beyond. Currently, we aim to expand our services to offer advanced ADMET evaluations for IND-enabling studies. These include services in drug transport, absolute metabolite identification, and cardiac safety screening via automated patch-clamp.

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