How Industry Safety Knowledge Becomes Screening Panels: From DruSafe to SafetyScreen77

In early drug discovery, identifying potential safety liabilities as early as possible is essential to reducing attrition during development. Many failures arise from off-target pharmacology – interactions with unintended biological targets that can lead to adverse effects.

Secondary pharmacology screening panels are widely used to detect these interactions early in the discovery process. However, as scientific knowledge of drug safety evolves, so too does the set of biological targets considered most relevant for screening.

The DruSafe initiative: defining an industry reference

To improve early safety assessment, pharmaceutical companies collaborated through the IQ Consortium DruSafe initiative.

By analyzing historical drug discovery programs and clinical safety outcomes, DruSafe identified biological targets most frequently associated with safety-related liabilities and adverse drug reactions. This work led to the DruSafe 77 target list, which is now widely used as a reference framework for secondary pharmacology screening strategies (Brennan et al., Nat Rev Drug Discov , 2024).

From recommendations to screening panels

While DruSafe defines which targets should be considered during early safety profiling, these recommendations must be translated into robust experimental assays that can support discovery programs.

Reliable assay formats and standardized experimental conditions are essential to ensure that off-target interactions can be interpreted consistently and compared across compounds. In practice, broader panels such as SafetyScreen77 can also be implemented through a screening cascade combining SafetyScreen18 (covering high-priority off-targets strongly linked to critical clinical outcomes) together with SafetyScreen59, allowing safety profiling to expand progressively as compounds advance in discovery and supporting readiness for IND submission.

SafetyScreen77: aligning screening with industry recommendations

To support safety profiling aligned with DruSafe recommendations, Eurofins Discovery developed SafetyScreen77, a secondary pharmacology panel designed to match the DruSafe 77 target framework.

By aligning with this reference list, SafetyScreen77 enables researchers to screen compounds against targets associated with known safety liabilities, helping identify potential risks earlier during drug discovery.
At Eurofins Discovery, we aim to translate evolving safety science and industry recommendations into reliable experimental tools that support more informed decision-making in early drug discovery.