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 May 2012
Molecular modeling is the theme of this month’s issue of Drug Discovery Today’s Editor’s Choice newsletter. Molecular modeling is an established computational toolbox to assist early drug discovery and development. It can be used to generate ideas on a compounds or macromolecules 3D conformation, protein–ligand interactions, and to make predictions on biological activities. In close collaboration with medicinal chemistry and biological experiments, the incorporation of molecular modeling can bring helpful insights into the behavior of molecules and make early drug discovery more efficient.
26 April 2012
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.
02 April 2012
In silico models, a phrase used to express ‘modelling performed on computer or via computer simulation’, is an area of very active development and has great potential across the pharmaceutical industry and also in other industries, such as the consumer goods and chemical industries, where ‘non-animal alternatives’ are being actively sought for assuring the safety of chemicals.
22 March 2012
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.
07 March 2012
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.
07 February 2012
Medicinal chemistry is the theme of this month’s issue of Drug Discovery Today’s Editor’s Choice newsletter. Medicinal chemistry is a complex science at the heart of drug discovery, drug design and drug hunting. It is the art of generating ‘molecules with function’ - lead compounds with potential for future drugs and optimizing these iteratively into medicines for unmet medical need.
06 February 2012
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.
23 January 2012
Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the pharmaceutical industry and the many commentaries highlighting inefficiencies of the sectors operating model, 2011 has proven to be a near-record year for approvals of innovative new drugs. These approvals include seven new cancer treatments with two of these (Pfizer’s crizotinib, Xalkori™ and Roche’s vemurafenib, Zelboraf™) made in conjunction with companion genetic tests, reinforcing the notion that the practice of stratified medicine has truly arrived. The forthcoming special issue of Drug Discovery Today on cancer highlights innovative contributions in basic, translational and clinical research made by UK scientists and clinicians in the fight against cancer.
23 January 2012
This month’s editorial is written by Antony J. Williams and Sean Ekins. “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”Isaac Newton
09 December 2011
Biomarkers. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when simply identifying a biomarker was considered a drug discovery success. Like the low hanging fruit initially exposed by the genomic revolution, that once common view has long since disappeared. Today, the line between the bench and the clinic is becoming increasingly blurred. Translational science has become a core element of the drug discovery paradigm, and with it has come an increasing need for an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to biomarker development.
23 November 2011
Diabetes is the theme of this month’s edition of Drug Discovery Today’s Editor’s Choice newsletter. According to the latest data published by the World Health Organization (WHO) approximately 346 million people worldwide are living with diabetes today. If left untreated, chronic hyperglycemia can lead to several macrovascular and microvascular diabetic complications. In spite of the epidemic proportions, exploding healthcare costs, and the great impact this disease has on patients, health care providers, health care systems and insurers, to date, no cures have been identified yet.
18 October 2011
Pharmacogenetics is the theme of this month’s edition of Drug Discovery Today Editor’s Choice. This coincides with the Drug Discovery Today special issue, ‘Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine’.
27 September 2011
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cells that ‘escape’ from primary tumor cells and migrate into the bloodstream, where they circulate through the body. CTCs were first identified in the 1980s as cells that had the morphology of tumor cells but were found in the blood. Over the past two decades technological innovations have eased the detection and analysis of CTCs. The resulting investigations of CTCs are an important area of clinical research because they are demonstrating that CTCs have potential clinical value as warning signals of cancer progression.
27 September 2011
This month’s Drug Discovery Today Editor’s Choice brings you unique perspectives on the potential of nanomedicines and the associated regulatory landscape, from researchers across the globe. We highlight four nanotechnology-related reviews from Drug Discovery Today and related publications that discuss the emerging concepts in the development of targeted therapeutic and imaging nanodevices, their path to clinical translation, and how they are being viewed from a regulatory environment.
26 August 2011
The pharmaceutical industry is facing tremendous challenges moving forward into the new millennium. These range from expiring patents on blockbuster drugs, to thin pipelines and stiffer regulatory hurdles, to name but a few; if it sounds like a major crisis then it probably is. In general, crisis management, which involves dealing with threats after they have occurred, is the result of poor risk management or inadequate strategic planning. As a result, the industry has seen an increase in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, which has resulted in job losses, mandatory efficiency campaigns across all R&D disciplines and an explosion in tapping emerging markets through outsourcing and acquisition-based market penetration.
25 July 2011
The innovation process in the pharmaceutical industry is, as for all evolutionary models of technological change, both ‘pushed by technology’ and ‘demand driven’. The core of the innovation relies on the research for new high value-added drugs to address unmet medical needs. To this end, tens of billions of dollars are invested per year in R&D. However, the decreasing number of approved drugs, which is accompanied by increasing R&D expenditures, demands alternative approaches to increase R&D productivity. This situation contributes to a revival of interest in peptides as potential tools and drug candidates.
28 June 2011
This month’s Drug Discovery Today Editor’s Choice newsletter is concerned with the field of ADME-Tox. We are highlighting aspects of this rapidly-expanding discipline with some recently published reviews from the pages of Drug Discovery Today.
31 May 2011
Although drug delivery may not attract the attention and press coverage of some of the other disciplines involved in drug discovery, it is equally important in the development of a successful product. Effective drug delivery can be the difference between getting a molecule into clinical trial rather than a chemical sitting in a brown bottle on the shelf, or a forgotten compound languishing in a 96 well storage plate. It can mean the difference between a drug that just wipes its feet in the market and the discovery of a blockbuster.
05 May 2011
Epigenetics is effectively the study of changes in gene function by covalent modifications. Such modifications result in a stably heritable phenotype that does not involve a change in DNA sequence. There are effectively 2 routes by which such covalent changes can be effected; first by methylation of C5 cytosine bases located 5’ to guanosines. This route is referred to as the cytosine methylation code. In addition, the histone component of chromosomes can be covalently modified at the N-terminus, the so-called histone code.
31 March 2011