Podcast | April 11, 2025
Empowered Patient Podcast: Molecular Characterization of Diseases Accelerates Drug Discovery through Approval
“What has happened recently, is a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of disease and how therapeutics interact with disease at a molecular level. We use multi-omics characterization to support pharmaceutical companies in understanding the safety and the efficacy of their drugs and being able to predict how their therapies will do in the clinic. We also use this deep profiling to understand a lot more about available drug targets, which expands the arsenal of ways to fight disease. Because we are able to profile patients very deeply at this molecular level, across 10,000 different metabolites, 10,000 different proteins, that enables us to give insights, not just data, to our clients around predictive response or safety or efficacy of a therapy.”
Listen to the full episode with Sapient’s Dr. Jonathan Usuka as a guest on the Empowered Patient podcast, in which he shares with host Karen Jagoda examples of how multi-omics insights are accelerating all aspects of the drug development pipeline, from early discovery to clinical approval.
One key question that came up during the conversation centered on development bias, and how multi-omics characterization using large-scale, nontargeted datasets can help mitigate this by providing a different way of looking at a drug. Here’s what Dr. Usuka had to say:
“There are two ways to look at it. One is that famously, pharma development can be risk averse because they’re investing in a development path. They’re focused on delivering one thing very well: success in a clinical trial. Too much data associated with that can have a couple of negative effects. It can be distracting for the development team. It also can suggest potential safety problems, which may or may not be real but which would have to be followed up on to make sure the drug is as safe as possible before bringing it to the market.
So what we do at Sapient is not just identify dynamic biomarkers – biomarkers that change with disease or change in response to therapy. We also give a lot of context about those biomarkers. We can say where we have seen those biomarkers occur and how they have changed in response to other therapies, disease conditions, and immunological responses. So, a pharma company can see better what it’s getting into when it invests in a dynamic biomarker. It also helps them understand if a drug did not make it through clinical trials, what went wrong and potentially rescue that therapy. We can help sort out who is and is not responding and, therefore, change how they recruit patients for trials.”
Hear the full episode above or by searching “Empowered Patient podcast” on your favorite podcast platform! You can also access the transcript here.