Recent research suggests that antibiotics can stimulate their own production. Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have demonstrated that an antibiotic produced by a soil bacterium can increase its own synthesis under certain conditions, a finding which may hold promise for dramatically increasing the efficiency of antibiotic manufacture.
19 June, 2013
An international team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has identified a highly promising new anti-tuberculosis compound that attacks the tuberculosis (TB) bacterium in two different ways.
18 June, 2013
Cancer Research Technology, the commercial arm of Cancer Research UK, the University of Manchester and AstraZeneca today announced two agreements to seek new cancer drugs.
17 June, 2013
A drug approved in Europe to treat osteoporosis has now been shown to stop the growth of breast cancer cells, even in cancers that have become resistant to current targeted therapies, according to a Duke Cancer Institute study.
17 June, 2013
The US Supreme Court has today dealt a blow to the worldwide biotech industry by declaring that inventions deriving from isolated human DNA cannot be patented. After months of speculation, it handed down its decision in the Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v Myriad Genetics case, which sought to establish if Myriad’s patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which increase susceptibility to breast cancer, were valid. The Court also ruled that because it is not a naturally occurring product, complementary DNA (cDNA) remains patentable.
13 June, 2013
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified key triggers of an important cancer-blocking mechanism in cells.
12 June, 2013
Optibrium, a developer of software for drug discovery, today announced the release of version 5.4 of its StarDrop™ software platform. This new release offers enhanced features to guide the design of novel, safe and efficacious drugs by providing access to world-leading technologies for toxicity prediction and bioisosteric transformations. These new optional modules further extend StarDrop’s capabilities to intuitively target high quality compounds in drug discovery, reducing the time and cost to deliver drug candidates with an improved chance of success.
11 June, 2013
A national research facility has opened which will put the UK at the forefront of a revolution in health and medical research. The MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre will examine around one hundred thousand blood and urine samples every year. It will analyse phenomes – the biological results of people's genes and environment – to help determine the causes of disease and indicate how treatments can be tailored for individual patients.
10 June, 2013
Picato (ingenol mebutate) gel is a topical treatment licensed for the cutaneous treatment of non-hyperkeratotic, non-hypertrophic actinic keratosis (AK) in adults, a type of skin damage caused by long-term sun, or UV exposure, that has the potential to progress to the non-melanoma skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma (SCC).
10 June, 2013
The latest issue of Drug Discovery Today is packed full of industry focused research articles, new developments in drug discovery, and expert comment and opinion.
10 June, 2013
A GBP250k prize is being offered to encourage researchers to deliver a breakthrough in toxicology research that could ultimately lead to the replacement of animals used in product safety testing.
06 June, 2013
UK biotechnology company Retrogenix announces that its unique human cell microarray technology played a pivotal role in determining the molecular interaction that triggers severe malaria in children. The discovery, reported this week in Nature, could lead to new therapies to combat a form of the disease that kills around one million children per year.
06 June, 2013
Cancer Research UK and its commercial arm, Cancer Research Technology (CRT), have joined forces with Abcodia, the biomarker validation company with a focus on cancer screening, to develop new blood tests to detect a range of cancers when they are still at a very early stage.
06 June, 2013
MRC Technology, a technology transfer organisation, announced today the presentation of positive data for lambrolizumab, initially advanced by MRC Technology’s antibody engineering group, at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. The study is also published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.
04 June, 2013
Atopix Therapeutics Ltd (“Atopix”), a biopharmaceutical company developing a novel class of anti-allergic medicines, has been awarded a £1.7 million grant from the UK Biomedical Catalyst fund to pursue development of OC459 in the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis (a form of eczema).
03 June, 2013
A lack of clinical trials aimed specifically at younger breast cancer patients could be partly to blame for their poorer survival rates, according to a major new Cancer Research UK study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
03 June, 2013
Virttu Biologics Limited, a UK biotechnology company with expertise in the field of oncolytic viruses, is pleased to announce at ASCO that an on-going clinical study in the USA with its oncolytic virus, SEPREHVIR® (HSV1716), in children and young adults with non-CNS tumours has received permission from the regulatory authorities to enrol patients to receive intra-venous administration of the virus.
01 June, 2013