Defining clinical outcome pathways.

Here, we propose a broad concept of 'Clinical Outcome Pathways' (COPs), which are defined as a series of key molecular and cellular events that underlie therapeutic effects of drug molecules. We formalize COPs as a chain of the following events: molecular initiating event (MIE) → intermediate event(s) → clinical outcome. We illustrate the concept with COP examples both for primary and alternative (i.