Startup works to bring cancer drugs to the market faster

Story excerpt provided by Akron Legal News. Written by Sherry Karabin.

While there is no one factor or rule that determines how quickly the U.S. Food and Drug Administration might approve a new drug, it often takes years for a pharmaceutical company to bring a new drug to market. In fact, a large number of experimental treatments never even progress to human clinical trials, with the research being scrapped in the very early stages of a drug’s development.

But the co-founders of the Akron-based startup OncoSolutions are working to increase a company’s odds of success, specifically when it comes to cancer drugs. They’ve developed technology intended to help get new cancer drugs to market faster in an effort to save some of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost each year.

“Based on our interviews with industry members, we discovered that up to 80 percent of cancer drugs fail in animal studies during oncology preclinical drug discovery testing and 95 percent fail in clinical trials,” said OncoSolutions Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Ham, who received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Akron in 2017. “This results in wasted time and money spent testing ineffective cancer drugs.

Click here to read the complete article. Originally published April 10, 2018.