Drug discovery and development faces a growing challenge to improve the success rate of drug candidates and to accelerate the lengthy, expensive process of bringing new medicines to patients. The emerging methodology of biomarker models has the potential to assist in exploring and finding novel drug targets and to aid at an early stage by assessing efficacy, and addressing issues with metabolism, toxicity and pharmacokinetics. Biomarker discovery and monitoring assays depend on sophisticated analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry that provides the sensitivity and specificity required to establish the models.:
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