Big Think

Question: What do you do?

Dr. Yvonne Will: Well in really simple terms, I try to make safer drugs every day. And that I look for alternatives to using animals and so I have models that live in little tissue culture flasks and little organelles that swim around you know, re-agent flasks.  And then I try to model what's reality and try to make safer drugs for patients. It's actually interesting because traditionally, safety is thought to be you know, occurring pretty late in the process in direct development.  So you spend years of defining your target, developing molecules, looking at efficacy and then at some point, you ask the question oh, is it safe to now go into a patient and try it out in a trial?  And so you have to go through rigorous you know, safety testing on the animal.  And so that's what has traditionally been done.  And on many occasions we thought it was safe in the animal and then later on in the patient we saw that you know, it had liabilities anyway.  So the thought that we have was in Pfizer, at least a lot of us now is to really start this much, much earlier.  So the minute somebody says, I think this is a good target to start thinking about it, you know, what do we know from competitors? What do we know from the literature?  Can we you know, identify possible risk for that target or for that chemical series that might target it.  And then we start thinking about it and also designing some experiments around it.

Recorded on: 06/25/2008