NINE in 10 potential drugs fail at a late stage, after millions of dollars have been spent developing them, because they are not effective enough.

A new research facility here hopes to catch this problem early, which will save money and hopefully single out successful drugs so they can be used on patients faster.

Drug giant Schering-Plough, which opened its laboratories at the research centre Biopolis yesterday, will study bodily indicators that highlight if a drug is working effectively, and use high technology imaging to see how a drug is working. Such indicators in the body are called biomarkers.

Traditional measures such as blood pressure and cholesterol count have been used for decades to indicate disease, but biomarkers such as specific proteins and blood cells have only caught the interest of pharmaceutical companies in the last five years.

For example, counting the number of tumour cells in the blood stream can show if a drug is doing its job by shrinking a tumour.

Said the head of Schering-Plough's new centre here, Dr Erik Sprengers: 'Biomarkers are for the drug hunter what a GPS navigator is for someone driving a car.

'They will tell us early if a project is on the right track. If we are not, we can stop it and spend resources on more successful ones. If they tell us we are on the right track, we can accelerate the investment and make a new therapy available to the patients faster.'

Such biomarker work will also help identify which patients will benefit most from which treatments, a step towards personalised medicine where drugs are tailor-made for individual patients, he added.

This is its first research unit dedicated to biomarker work. The company, the first American drug firm to start a manufacturing plant here in 1995, will also open a clinical unit with 25 to 35 beds later in the year, to test potential drugs in people. Fifteen scientists have been hired and this will increase to 70 in the next few years, said Dr Sprengers.

Six major pharmaceutical companies have already set up research centres here.

Read the full story in today's edition of The Straits Times.