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… Read More
Implementation or algorithm? The value of Bioinformatics By Dr Christopher Hogue Recently the value of bioinformatics has been questioned. The value can be proven but are there enough qualified and professionally trained people who know how to build good bioinformatics tools? At the BIO convention in New York recently, I… Read More
Pharmaceutical Industry R&D Partnering Strategies By Riccardo Pigliucci Drug Discovery With a sustained rate of more than 250 R&D partnering deals each year many valuable lessons are being learned. Although there is no exact 'formula for success' there are many 'success factors' that can be utilised to reduce the risk… 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 e-R&D and explore… 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. Mounting pressure to… Read More
The promise of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics By Dr Tim Peakman and Dr Steve Arlington Within the next 10 years the benefits of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics will inevitably outweigh the disadvantages. But what are the commercial and legal implications for the pharmaceutical industry especially for companies who have lead candidates ready… Read More
High Throughput Screening (HTS) - Where next? By Dr Mark Beggs After approximately a decade of maturation and a three orders of magnitude increase in capabilities, High Throughput Screening (HTS) is now an established discipline within pharmaceutical discovery. But opposing stresses exist within the screening world; the resolution of which… Read More
The Integration Abyss By Dr Scott D. Kahn The long-standing disconnect between target discovery/characterisation and compound discovery is a major challenge facing the pharmaceutical industry in its quest to develop innovative therapies from the wealth of information flowing from the human genome. There is enormous interest within the pharmaceutical and… Read More
Discovery Research in the Co-Genomic Era - Biology goes industrial By Dr Timothy Wells and Dr Georg Feger The parallel between the search for gold in the last century and drug discovery in the co-genome era is very clear. As with all gold rushes the rewards will go to the… Read More
Drug Delivery - Adding value to drug development and commercialisation By Dr Cornelis 'Cees' Winnips The importance of drug delivery as a tool to improve R&D productivity, to provide a pathway for valuable drugs to be successfully commercialised and as an expanding resource to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, has… Read More
Do venture capitalists act as gatekeepers of new technology? By Dr June Grindley and Samantha Smart This article discusses the important role that venture capitalists and others play in helping to create companies around new technologies. We asked a number of venture capitalists, when considering funding a new company, what… Read More
High-throughput Crystallisation By Dr Sara Moran and Dr Lance Stewart With structure-based drug design on the increase can the development of high-throughput crystallisation fulfil its promise to revolutionise the drug discovery process? In an era when the development of drugs is hindered by the exorbitant costs of discovery and clinical… 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 what we already… 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 alone the real increase in… Read More
By Peter Ertl, Wolfgang Miltz, Bernhard Rohde and Paul Selzer Readily accessible tools with easy to use interfaces, especially integrated into regularly used desktop applications, can improve the impact of cheminformatics in pharmacological research. Starting either from a single molecule or from a larger data set, these tools provide information… Read More
By Michael P. Murphy, MSc Pharmacogenomics offers the opportunity to adopt a new paradigm in drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is faced with a number of challenges including relatively low productivity and success in bringing new drugs to market. Investors demand that pharmaceutical companies deliver several new drugs to the… Read More
