Animal models

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 pain conditions and the pharmacology of existing therapies. […]

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. This article discusses how we urgently need […]

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 a rich vein of pharmaceutical activity? In […]

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 become the primary testing ground for novel […]

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 e-R&D and explore the potential in networks. It […]

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 hurdles, both scientific and practical, must be […]

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. Mounting pressure to screen more targets against 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. To date, the main applications of gene therapy have been in […]

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 what we already have and what’s coming in […]

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 alone the real increase in industry R&D expenditure. In particular, […]