Key Issues and Perspectives for Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics in Drug Discovery and Development

Recently pharmacokinetics is increasingly gaining weight in the development of new drugs. At every stage of the development process (from discovery to sales and even after the launch of a product), it is becoming essential to generate appropriate pharmacokinetics information in a timely manner. The information is quite useful and, therefore, enables us to make a go/no-go decision on a sound scientific basis. This report presents an overall picture of pharmacokinetics study conducted at our laboratory including some methods employed for this purpose. In addition, one of the new technologies that are expected to empower the pharmacokinetics study as well as clinical trials is described.