Doha: Senior researchers and medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) have published a paper focused on improving drug-screening platforms for vascular diseases.

The research team, led by Dr. Isra Marei, Post-Doctoral Associate in Pharmacology, includes four members of WCM-Q's Class of 2024 — Tala Abu Samaan, Maryam Ali Al Quradaghi, Asmaa A Farah and Shamin Hayat Mahmud along with Professor Chris Triggle, Professor of Pharmacology, and Associate Professor of Pharmacology Hong Ding. 

The study has been published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine as an invited review for a special issue on regenerative medicine and is titled, '3D tissue-engineered vascular drug screening platforms: promise and considerations'.

The paper focused on improving drug screening platforms for vascular diseases. Drug screening is an important step towards drug discovery; however, drugs pass through several screening and validation steps before they are approved for clinical use. This process takes at least 10 years between pre-clinical in vitro testing and clinical studies. Despite many drugs showing great promise in the pre-clinical phase, only 10 percent of the drugs that enter phase 1 clinical trials are expected to advance to the point they receive approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

Dr. Marei, first author of the paper, said,“The high failure rate of many drugs in development could be attributed in part to the limitations of the currently used pre-clinical 2D models, which do not accurately reflect human physiological responses. Thus, there is a need to mimic the human physiological conditions in pre-clinical studies to improve drug screening platforms. 

“A novel approach is to use patients' stem cells to develop 3D tissue-engineered constructs in vitro. Such platforms will also offer the potential for personalised drug testing to accommodate patients' specific needs. We feel there is a great deal of potential in this line of study for making drug screening more effective, and this really captured the imagination of the students, who made excellent contributions to this work.”

Personalization using 3D systems might eventually provide a predictive and relatively cost-effective method to screen out unsuccessful drug developments and reduce the need for clinical trials. 

The background to the manuscript stems from an Undergraduate Research Experience Program (UREP) grant (UREP25-042-3-011) funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) with the title: 'Towards the Development of an Endothelial Progenitor Cell - Based Vascular Graft for Drug Screening' and also an Advanced Biomedical Sciences Research Requirement (ABSR) project awarded to Maryam Ali Al Quradaghi. 

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