An Urgent Need for Change in Drug Development 

Developing new medicines is a slow, costly, and often inefficient process. It typically takes over ten years and more than a billion dollars to bring a single drug from discovery to market. Despite these investments, many candidates fail during clinical trials, leading to significant losses in time, money, and human effort. This inefficient system delays access to potentially life-saving treatments and disproportionately affects people in lower-income regions and underrepresented groups in society. The problem is especially severe in areas like infectious and inflammatory diseases, where the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance demands faster, more effective solutions. 

Why Traditional Clinical Trials Are Holding Us Back 

At the heart of the issue is the current model of drug testing, which relies on sequential clinical trial phases that are long, expensive, and require broad systemic drug exposure—even when it’s unclear whether a drug is likely to succeed. Promising compounds can be discarded too early due to limitations in methodology, while others advance despite weak early signals, only to fail later on. This risk-averse and resource-intensive approach stifles innovation and contributes to the shrinking pipeline of new antibiotics and anti-inflammatory therapies. The methods we use to test new drugs have not kept pace with scientific and technological advances. 

A Transformative Opportunity: Intra-Target Microdosing 

MicroTex responds to this challenge by advancing a promising but underdeveloped approach: Intra-Target Microdosing (ITM). ITM enables researchers to deliver a tiny dose of a new drug to a highly localised area in the body and directly measure its effects—long before larger trials are necessary. This can rapidly identify ineffective compounds, saving years of work and millions of pounds in R&D costs. Crucially, it also allows effective candidates to move forward with greater confidence, ultimately getting better drugs to patients, faster. 

However, for ITM to reach its full potential, major technological barriers must be overcome. Precision delivery tools, sensitive microscale measurement systems, and robust data integration platforms are all essential to ensure ITM is reliable, reproducible, and scalable. MicroTex is building exactly this toolkit, combining world-class engineering, clinical expertise, and public engagement to revolutionise the early stages of therapeutic innovation.