Novartis could cut drug development by a year

piggy submitted, created time 1 week 3 days (www.reuters.com)

A new way of conducting clinical trials could allow Novartis AG to cut the time needed to develop some drugs by a year, the Swiss drug maker's designated development head said on Wednesday.

The new approach, which uses disease models to predict measurable markers and responses, could apply in areas like oncology and genetic diseases and allow mid-stage trials to be shortened or even, in some cases, omitted completely.

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Nanoparticle Research Aids Drug Development

piggy submitted, created time 3 weeks 12 hours (www.sciencedaily.com)

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a new technology which can dramatically improve the effectiveness of antibacterial treatments.

Soluble drugs, soluble antibiotics in this case, that can dissolve in water tend to be more effective at lower doses, but these are rare. Insoluble drugs are more common, but they have to be administered at higher doses so that the patient will feel the same effect

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Pathways to cancer therapy

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 weeks 16 hours (www.nature.com)

New studies have affirmed the complexity of genetic changes in solid tumors, but also revealed commonalities in the associated pathways, suggesting that a pathway-oriented perspective could aid cancer drug discovery and therapy.

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BioTie Therapies Inc. to Acquire Neurology and Immunology Focused Pharmaceutical Company Elbion GmbH

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 4 days (www.fiercebiotech.com)

BioTie Therapies has today entered into an agreement to acquire the German pharmaceutical company elbion GmbH. The combination of the two businesses will take place by a share exchange and create a leading European company in the field of discovery and development of therapeutics for central nervous system (addiction, psychotic disorders) and inflammatory diseases (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory diseseas of the respiratory system). elbion GmbH will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of BioTie.

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New Osteoporosis Drugs in the Works

jerry submitted, created time 2 months 1 week (www.webmd.com)

Two experimental osteoporosis drugs are getting attention from bone experts -- and may become the first biologic drugs to treat osteoporosis. Both these drugs work by targeting osteoclasts--the cells that break down bone--giving their bone-building counterparts, called osteoblasts, time to catch up.

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New mutant collection examines six thousand genes. Next big thing in drug discovery?

jerry submitted, created time 2 months 4 weeks (stke.sciencemag.org)

A major challenge in drug discovery is to identify the cellular targets responsible for the pharmacological activity of drug candidates. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a heterozygous diploid mutant collection of approximately six thousand strains, in each of which one copy of a single gene is deleted, is commercially available. With this collection, it is possible to evaluate the role of each gene product in the response of cells to a drug

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Anadis Opens New Approach to Respiratory Disease Control

kavin submitted, created time 3 months 13 hours (www.medicalnewstoday.com)

Anadis Limited (ASX: ANX), a research-driven biopharmaceutical company focused on polyclonal antibodies to address human disease, announced important progress concerning its accelerated program to develop a nasal antibody spray to provide immediate post-exposure prophylaxis against a range of influenza viruses.

Working with an animal influenza challenge model in the laboratory of Professor Loreena Brown at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, scientists successfully completed a series of proof-in-principal experiments

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A Lipidic-Sponge Phase Screen for Membrane Protein Crystallization

jerry submitted, created time 4 months 2 weeks (www.structure.org)

A major current deficit in structural biology is the lack of high-resolution structures of eukaryotic membrane proteins, many of which are key drug targets for the treatment of disease. Numerous eukaryotic membrane proteins require specific lipids for their stability and activity, and efforts to crystallize and solve the structures of membrane proteins that do not address the issue of lipids frequently end in failure rather than success. To help address this problem, they have developed a sparse matrix crystallization screen consisting of 48 lipidic-sponge phase conditions

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Stopping clinical trials early

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 months 15 hours (www.bmj.com)

Should we be worried about an apparent rise in the number of clinical trials now being stopped early because the results are so good? Margaret McCartney asks how convincing should results be before trials are halted - and what the implications are for patients.

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Logic models of pathway biology

kavin submitted, created time 6 months 2 weeks (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Living systems seamlessly perform complex information processing and control tasks using combinatorially complex sets of biochemical reactions. Here, they describe the use of logic as a tractable and informative approach to modelling biological pathways that can allow us to improve our understanding of the dependencies in complex biological processes.

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New Cholesterol Genes found are potentially attractive drug targets

DanyC submitted, created time 10 months 2 weeks (www.webmd.com)

Two of the newly identified genes only affect HDL cholesterol, one only affects LDL cholesterol, three only affect triglycerides, and one affects LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. it may be possible to tailor cholesterol and triglyceride treatments to patients

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OTAVA offers new Death-Associated Protein Kinase 2 (DAPK-2) focused Library.

Translating form into function

BIOBOSS submitted, created time 1 year 4 months (www.eurekalert.org)

In the last 40 years, scientists have perfected ways to determine the knot-like structure of enzymes, but they've been stumped trying to translate the structure into an understanding of function -- what the enzyme actually does in the body. This puzzle has hurt drug discovery, since many of the most successful drugs work by blocking enzyme action. Now, in an expedited article in Nature, researchers show that a solution to the puzzle is finally in sight.

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A constrained polynomial regression procedure for estimating the local False Discovery Rate

DanyC submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.biomedcentral.com)

"In the framework of estimating procedures without any distributional assumption under the alternative hypothesis, a new and efficient procedure for estimating the lFDR is described. The results of a simulation study indicated good performances for the proposed estimator in comparison to four published ones. The five different procedures were applied to real datasets."

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Lupus drug yield good results in mid-stage trial

Reviver submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.reutershealth.com)

Human Genome Sciences Inc. said data from a mid-stage trial showed that its lupus drug candidate, LymphoStat-B, significantly reduced disease activity across multiple clinical measures.

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