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Every year, drugs are approved to treat deadly diseases, but often times, researchers don't even fully understand how their own drugs work.
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This is the case for more than half of all drugs approved by the FDA, because properly understanding how a drug works isn't actually a regulatory requirement. Companies only need to prove that a drug is safe and that it works, not why it works.
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This is **of the biggest root causes of clinical trial failures—pharmaceutical institutions don't spend spend enough time and money on validating a drug's target and understanding its mechanism of action, due to time and resource constraints.
🥟 In addition**, off-target interactions of drugs are not studied enough** in the early stages of clinical trials, which leads to many of the consequences in later stages.
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One barrier to these early studies is that these drug companies get their information on targets and mechanisms from a small handful of the thousands of research papers assessing the biological mechanisms at play.
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and due to this, researchers have a poor understanding of a drug’s mechanism of action,
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making it difficult to identify correct biomarkers
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