By Dr Mark L. Nelson Less than a hundred years ago, if you developed a microbial infection your immune system couldnt handle, you died. Then came the wonder drugs, antibiotics capable of fighting the infections for you. But times have changed. Read More
By Dr Patrick J. Vojta, Vincent P. Kazmer and Dr Larry D. Kier Adverse drug responses are an important post-marketing public health issue, occurring many times in subsets of treatment populations. Promising new approaches to predicting physiological responses to drugs are focused on genomic responses… Read More
Metabolism Provides Alternative Door to Stroke Therapy By Dr Keith F. Martin and Tony Dolan Even in the age of genomics and gene hunters, a holistic view of cell metabolism can result in revolutionary new drugs. You know that feeling you get the day… Read More
Proteomics In Drug Target Discovery – High-throughput meets high-efficiency By Dr Terence E. Ryan and Dr Scott D. Patterson Biochemistry is enjoying a renaissance under the guise of ‘proteomics’ due to the availability of sequenced genomes, advances in mass spectrometry and associated data analysis. Its application to… Read More
The genomics revolution is poised to sweep aside the old economics of pharmaceutical R&D. The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries; and perhaps healthcare delivery in general; are on the brink of transformation, and companies that embrace the revolution in the right way stand to reap enormous benefits. Read More
New Developments in Analgesia By Dr Susan Boyce, Dr Zahid Ali and Dr Raymond G. Hill Novel therapies for pain and headache are major medical needs and constitute a continued opportunity. Novel treatments are likely to arise from a better understanding of both the pathophysiology of clinical… Read More
Surrogate Endpoints In Cancer Trials By Professor Karol Sikora Over the next 20 years systematic programmes of cancer risk assessment will be established and cancer-preventive drugs will be developed. The ability to prevent cancer will dramatically increase the number of people who will need to regularly attend clinics. Read More
Stem Cells – The long march forward to the clinic By Dr Alan Colman The area of cellular therapeutics has never been readily embraced by ‘Big Pharma’, with ethical and regulatory issues even more complex and troublesome than proteins. Can stem cell therapy provide the key to unlocking… Read More
Biologically Relevant Chemistry By Dr Stephen A. Hill A large proportion of R&D expenditure relates to the investigation of compounds which ultimately fail to reach the market as useful medicines. We discuss why early drug discovery – using high throughput, automated in vitro and in silico methods, must… Read More
e-R&D – The internet at work By Dr Alpheus Bingham and Dr Neil Bodick It is difficult to understand how the continuing growth of large monolithic Research & Development organisations can sustain the industry. With the economies of scale providing diminishing returns we examine the promise of… Read More
Modelling and simulation in drug development, promise and reality By Dr Mark Sale Modelling and simulation in drug development is not new. What is new is the vision for moving from a descriptive role (what happened) to a predictive and therefore decision making role. While seemingly attractive, important… Read More
Increasing the chances of lead discovery By Sandra Fox, MBA, Dr Helen Wang, Dr Lynne Sopchak and Dr Richard Khoury For HTS laboratories worldwide, the mission is to supply therapeutic groups in the shortest time possible with high quality hits and leads that will become drug candidates. Read More
The Genie in the Test Tube – From Gene to Gene Therapy: Part 2 By Dr Jan Steiner In the previous edition, we discussed gene therapy in terms of potential vectors and their applications. Now, we discuss the potential clinical uses of these constructs. Read More
The Industrialisation of Bioinformatics By Dr Alex Titomirov With the completion of the ‘draft’ sequence of the human genome predicting an estimate of 40,000-120,000 genes that describe us, the real work begins. The problem now is not lack of data but lack of tools to thoroughly analyse… Read More
By Dr David C. U’Prichard It is almost axiomatic that the pharmaceutical R&D industry has not achieved in the last decade an increase in productivity (measured as high value NCEs) commensurate with the explosion of new biological information, chemistry techniques and information storage/retrieval/examination systems, let… Read More
Emerging therapeutic vaccines By Marc Hertz, Soren Mouritsen and Anand Gautam The excitement over the past 30 years for immunotherapy of cancer and other diseases has not led to the expected clinical successes. Over-enthusiasts predicted a cure for cancer with the initial development of monoclonal antibody technology, and… Read More
