In chemical reactions left and right can make a big difference. A "left-handed" molecule of a particular chemical composition could be an effective drug, while its mirror-image "right-handed" counterpart could be completely inactive. That's because, in biology, "left" and "right" molecular designs are crucial: living organisms are made only from left-handed amino acids. So telling the two apart is important-but difficult.
28 June, 2013
Designing new drugs is a complex, multi-objective problem, requiring the simultaneous optimisation of target affinity, target tissue exposure, formulation, toxicity – the list goes on. Innovative drug designers are constantly identifying new methods they can use to improve their drug design capabilities to the extent that designers now have unprecedented access to data, tools and resources. The challenge faced by many is how to integrate these multiple inputs and opinions to maximise their effect and accelerate drug discovery projects into the clinic.
27 June, 2013
Virttu Biologics Limited a UK biotechnology company with expertise in thefield of oncolytic viruses reports that it has received a Notice of Allowance from the US Patent and Trade Mark Office in respect of US patent application 12/436,382 and Virttu expects the patent to be issued in the fourth quarter 2013.
26 June, 2013
Almost half of teens and young adults with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) – a typically aggressive form of leukaemia – are cured thanks to improvements in treatment and care, according to research published in the British Journal of Haematology.
24 June, 2013
BerGenBio AS today announced the start of a Phase 1 Clinical Trial for BGB324, a first-in-class small molecule inhibitor of AXL tyrosine kinase.
24 June, 2013
Scientists have discovered the survival secret to a genetic mutation that stokes leukemia cells, solving an evolutionary riddle and paving the way to a highly targeted therapy for leukemia. In a paper published in Cell, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center describe how a mutated protein, called Fbxw7, behaves differently when expressed in cancer cells versus healthy cells.
24 June, 2013
Sanofi and the Curie Institute have announced a three-year research collaboration to identify new therapeutic targets for the treatment of ovarian cancer.
21 June, 2013
The Pistoia Alliance has announced the release of the HELM biomolecular representation standard software toolkit and editor under the permissive open source MIT licence.
21 June, 2013
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that could counter Parkinson’s disease in two ways at once.
20 June, 2013
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
The scientific cooperation between chemists, biotechnologists and physicists from various Catalan institutes, headed by Pau Gorostiza, from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and Ernest Giralt, from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), has led to a breakthrough that will favor the development of light-regulated therapeutic molecules.
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