Drug Development
Featured Topics in Life Sciences: Alternative Medicine | Government Funding | Drug Delivery | Diagnostics | Chemistry | all topics
Filter by: News | Articles | New to Market | Tools & Technology | Videos | Podcasts | Journal Articles | White Papers
Mar 10 | News
For decades, the traditional practice in animal testing has been standardization, but a study involving Purdue Univ. has shown that adding as few as two controlled environmental variables to preclinical mice tests can greatly reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.
Feb 8 | News
The finding is limited to mice and rats, but the conclusions of the Columbia Univ. Medical Center study are conclusive: an experimental drug that blocks serotonin synthesis in the gut also blocks the tendency for serotonin to inhibit bone formation. Researchers say the discovery could lead to a new class of drugs.
Feb 2 | News
Any researcher with the Chemical Abstracts Service, which has tens of millions of compounds on file, can tell you immediately: a promising drug compound is a needle in a haystack. At Scripps Research Institute, researchers have combined bead library screening and microarray-based analysis into an automated, efficient system that can test libraries of millions.
Feb 1 | News
Researchers in the UK and the U.S. have together grown a crystal that reveals the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV that use it to paste a copy of its genetic code into infected DNA. New antiretroviral drugs block integrase, but until now scientists didn’t know exactly how they worked.
Jan 22 | News
By combining the tools of medicinal chemistry and zebrafish biology, a team of Vanderbilt investigators has identified compounds that may offer therapeutic leads for bone-related diseases and cancer. The findings support using zebrafish as a novel platform for drug development.
Jan 19 | News
Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have built targeted nanoparticles that can cling to artery walls and slowly release medicine, an advance that potentially provides an alternative to drug-releasing stents in some patients with cardiovascular disease.
Jan 18 | News
Researchers at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered how cells in the body flatten out as they adhere to internal bodily surfaces, the first step in a wide range of important processes including clot formation, immune defense, wound healing, and the spread of cancer cells.
Jan 15 | News
A breakthrough discovery by scientists at the Univ. of Kentucky could someday lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases of the brain, spinal cord, and the eye. Researchers found that the small molecule withaferin A can simultaneously target two key proteins—vimentin and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)—implicated in a damaging biological process called reactive gliosis.
Jan 15 | News
Zebrafish studies at Harvard designed to screen drugs’ effects on behavior have revealed pathways affecting sleep and wakefulness. These pathways, which are largely involving anti-inflammatory compounds such as cytokines, say researchers, are likely shared with humans.
Jan 15 | News
Parasitic wasps kill pest insects, but their existence has been largely overlooked by the public—until now. Four researchers from Arizona State Univ. are among a consortium of 157 scientists who have sequenced the genomes of three parasitoid wasp species. The genomes reveal many features that could be useful in pest control, medicine and the understanding of genetics and evolution.