For a compound to become a successful drug, it needs not only to perform the right molecular interactions with its target to make it effective, but also to be processed correctly by the body. For the majority of projects the ideal compound is soluble, able to pass through the gut wall, not broken down too quickly by liver enzymes and have a minimal affinity to fatty tissues and blood proteins. Collectively these properties are known as the ADME properties (for absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion) and getting the right blend is critical to success.

Traditionally, testing compounds to see if they had the right ADME properties was carried out on relatively few compounds at a time, often using full animal studies. Now, the industry is turning to faster, more cost-efficient evaluation methods in order to screen the glut of compounds that have arisen as a result of advances in target discovery and chemical synthesis.

But simply generating large spreadsheets of ADME data for all the compounds in the discovery bottleneck is only part of the solution. What drug discovery researchers really need to know is whether a compound will exist in the body long enough to have a therapeutic effect - referred to as its pharmacokinetics. In this section we describe our experimental in vitro ADME screening technologies and how we can use these results for accurate pharmacokinetic prediction.