With just 10% of therapeutic programs successfully moving from first toxicity dose to market, drug developers are on a constant hunt for new tricks to put the odds in their favor. Strategies abound, from biomarker-guided patient selection to deeper regulatory engagement. But big pharma executives and an academic expert weighing the challenge at the BIO International Convention said June 14 they see another tool slowly gaining traction with the potential to decrease timelines and boost chances for approval: in-silico modeling.

Amid a convergence of demographic, economic and technological trends, more workers are engaged in U.S. life sciences research than ever before, a new analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. The analysis, by commercial real estate giant CBRE Group Inc., found that even with a doubling in the number of U.S. graduates in biological and biomedical sciences since 2005, biopharma companies continue to face major challenges finding talent and, increasingly, space in which to put that talent to work.

With just 10% of therapeutic programs successfully moving from first toxicity dose to market, drug developers are on a constant hunt for new tricks to put the odds in their favor. Strategies abound, from biomarker-guided patient selection to deeper regulatory engagement. But big pharma executives and an academic expert weighing the challenge at the BIO International Convention said June 14 they see another tool slowly gaining traction with the potential to decrease timelines and boost chances for approval: in-silico modeling.