Clinical specialities

Individualised Systems Medicine: Next-Generation Precision Cancer Medicine and Drug Positioning By Tea Pemovska, Paaivi Östling, Caroline Heckman, Olli Kallioniemi and Krister Wennerberg A growing number of oncology drugs are currently clinically available and more than a thousand compounds are being developed for oncology indications. Thus, the challenge is to systematically develop all these drugs to […]

Share Share Tweet Email The Development of Cell-Based Assays For Pain Drug Discovery The Development of Cell-Based Assays For Pain Drug Discovery By Dr Paul Karila and Dr Charlotta Blom Since the completion of the Human Genome Project and the beginning of the so-called genomics era in the 1990s, a molecular target-based approach has been […]

Epigenetic Targets: On the verge of becoming a major new category for successful drug research By Dr John Comley Most vendors of epigenetic modification proteins and reagents have enhanced and broadened their offerings in recent years. Of particular note is the increasing range of proteins and binding assays that now support research on the Bromodomains […]

BioPharma and CROs Collaborating In Early Drug Discovery By Dr John Montana and Cornelis E.C.A. Hop BioPharma and CROs are riding the latest wave – discovery research – together with a vigour and gusto that might have seemed implausible five years ago. How these collaborations are structured, and how well they function, can vary widely, […]

Anti-Infective Immunotherapy For Treating Hospital Acquired Infections By Dr Vu Truong, Dr Nadine Weich, Dr Andreas Loos and Dr Eric Patzer The frequency of nosocomial (acquired in healthcare facility) pneumonia has experienced a steady increase in recent years, and treatment of these infections has become more challenging and expensive due to the emergence of multi-drug […]

Adoptive T-Cell Therapies: unlocking the potential of engineered antigen receptors By Dr Cenk Sumen, Dr Dan Williams and Dr Gwendolyn Binder-Scholl T-cells with engineered receptors to target tumours represent living drugs with enormous potential in the fight against cancer, but many challenges remain to be overcome in order for their full potential to be achieved. […]

Experimental therapeutics for celiac disease and refractory celiac disease. By Dr Francisco Leon and Beth Llewellyn Celiac disease is a permanent immunological intolerance to gluten proteins in genetically predisposed individuals. In celiac patients, gluten causes a systemic autoimmune disease which starts in the small intestine but spreads to other organs in approximately one half of […]

Precise genome editing: the key to a CRISPR drug discovery pipeline? By Dr. J. D. Wrigley, Dr M Maresca, Dr K Birmingham, Dr M Bohlooly-Y and Dr L M. Mayr From the pioneering days of Watson and Crick in 1953, to completion of the human genome project in 2003, advances in our understanding of DNA […]

Misconduct in the biomedical sciences part 1: issues and causes By Dr Gerald H. Lushington and Rathnam Chaguturu Science pursues truth. Real advances in biomedical sciences improve our quality of life and save lives, but the path to these advances is cluttered with the distraction of irreproducible results – an affliction that has reached epidemic […]

Therapeutic Drug Repurposing, Repositioning and Rescue Part II: Business Review By Dr Stephen Naylor, David M. Kauppi and Judge M. Schonfeld There is an emerging consensus that the impact of Drug Repurposing, Repositioning and Rescue (DRPx) on the pharmaceutical industry is real and sustainable. The activity and productivity of DRPx focused companies as well as […]

By Dr Andy Tsun, Jia Li, Joanne Sun, Dr Michael Yu, Dr Yajie Li and Xiaolin Liu In the past decade, China’s drug market has been expanding in double-digit percentages. This has brought about a huge increase in local drug makers and has lured multinational pharmaceutical companies to develop, manufacture and commercialise their drug products […]

Redesigning Therapeutic Drug Monitoring for the 21st Century By Lewis Couchman Therapeutic drug monitoring services are a vital part of the pathology laboratory’s remit, providing essential clinical information to guide the management and treatment of a wide range of patients, from those with psychiatric disorders to post-transplantation care. King’s College Hospital, London, is developing automated […]

Data-mining Open Source Databases for Drug Repositioning Using Graph-Based Technique By Dr Ken McGarry & Ukeme Daniel The analysis of ‘Big Data’ has great potential in drug discovery; however complications arise in integrating this data in a principled and coherent way. An important statistical tool to manage complexity is that of graph theory, which is […]

Therapeutic Drug Repurposing, Repositioning and Rescue Part I: Overview By Dr Stephen Naylor & Judge M. Schonfeld The pharmaceutical industry is still beleaguered by escalating costs, stagnant productivity and protracted timelines as it struggles to bring therapeutic drugs to market. This situation has been compounded by a ravenous generic drug sector, and patients that have […]

Opportunities For Phenotypic Screening In Drug Discovery By David C. Swinney Renewed awareness of the value of phenotypic screening to drug discovery creates many new opportunities to increase drug discovery success and productivity. These opportunities include identification of translational phenotypic biomarkers, development of new assays that translate to human disease and refinement of paradigms to […]

Vector Mediated Therapeutics Based Upon DNA-Directed RNA Interference By Dr David Suhy A decade and a half after being first described to occur in mammalian cells, numerous trials are indicating that RNA interference can be harnessed to treat human disease. This article argues that positive results are now starting to emerge for the application of […]