A Year in Review for Safety Pharmacology

2025: Advancing Safety Pharmacology Through Data, Standards and Interpretation

Over the past year, safety pharmacology has continued to evolve from a support function into a strategic pillar of drug discovery. As safety expectations increase and development timelines tighten, teams need tools that don’t just generate data – but convert it into confident, early decisions.

At Eurofins Discovery, 2025 marked a major step forward in how safety risks are identified, understood, and communicated.

From Historical Failures to Predictive Panels

One of the biggest challenges in drug discovery remains drug attrition due to unforeseen safety liabilities. Many of these failures are not random – they are rooted in recurring off-target interactions that could have been detected earlier with the right strategy.

That’s why we launched our new SafetyScreen18, SafetyScreen59, and SafetyScreen77 panels, developed following the latest recommendations from the IQ DruSafe consortium – a collaboration of leading pharmaceutical companies that analyzed thousands of their historical drug programs to identify off-targets most strongly associated with clinical safety failures.

By integrating this real-world industry knowledge with:

Broad organ system coverage
Robust, human-relevant in vitro assays
Availability in Functional (dose–response) and Binding formats

these panels give drug discovery teams access to the same industry-aligned safety framework used by top pharma, now accessible at every stage of discovery.

They are designed not only to detect risks earlier, but to help companies make smarter trade-offs when selecting and optimizing lead candidates.

New Visualization Tools to Guide Your Next Decision with Confidence

Generating safety pharmacology data is only half the journey – understanding it and acting on it is where decisions are made.

In 2025, we introduced two new interpretation platforms:

These tools were created with one goal: to make complex secondary pharmacology results easier to analyze, easier to explain, and easier to act on.

By transforming large datasets into structured visual outputs and organ-level risk insights, they help project teams move from raw numbers to risk-based decisions with faster and greater confidence.

This is especially critical in multidisciplinary drug discovery environments, where toxicologists, pharmacologists, chemists, and project leaders all need a shared view of safety risk.

Strengthening the Scientific Foundation

Alongside these service innovations, 2025 also marked an important scientific milestone with the publication of:

“Comprehensive Analysis of Clinically Discontinued Compounds Using an In Vitro Secondary Pharmacology Panel to Predict Potential Safety Risks during Drug Development” in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science.

This work demonstrates how systematic in vitro secondary pharmacology profiling can help predict safety-related failures earlier and more reliably – reinforcing the scientific foundation behind modern safety screening strategies.

It echoes a message already clear across the industry:

better early safety profiling reduces risk, saves resources, and increases the likelihood of successful clinical development.

As safety expectations continue to evolve, our focus remains clear:

to deliver tools, panels, and insights that help you de-risk earlier, decide smarter, and move forward with confidence.