List view / Grid view
20 March 2009 | By
Generating knowledge and insight from complex genomic data sets is always a challenging endeavor. As data collection becomes more routine and less expensive, and the existing body of data expands, getting the most out of genomics experiments requires ever more expertise and insight. Here, we discuss our method of integrating…
7 February 2009 | By
For plants and invertebrates, RNA interference is firmly established as an important antiviral mechanism. Even before Fire, Mello, and co-workers described RNA interference (RNAi) in worms in 19981 it was becoming clear that plants have an RNA-dependent pathway that protects against viral infections2. The pathway, then termed post-transcriptional gene silencing…
7 February 2009 | By
The current cost of developing a new medicine for the treatment of human disease has been estimated at $1 to $2 billion (€750-1.5 million1,2). Given progressive increases in the cost of developing new drugs, pharmaceutical companies are facing significant pressure to streamline discovery methods and increase the translational efficiency of…
29 September 2008 | By
Advances in proteomics have constantly altered our understanding of cell biology and biochemistry by providing new approaches and techniques to identify complex proteomes, protein-protein interactions and post-translational modifications. Additionally, proteomic approaches are believed to have enormous potential for discovery of disease biomarkers that can provide diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets…
29 September 2008 | By
European Pharmaceutical Review invited three individuals to discuss current ideas and issues surrounding biomarkers and their possibilities.
2 August 2008 | By
Gene silencing by RNA interference (RNAi) uses double-stranded RNA to shut down gene expression in cells. This provides the possibility that this new methodology could be used in the treatment of disease symptoms and disease processes. A particular attraction of RNAi (as well as other gene knockdown methods of treatment,…
19 March 2008 | By
The early 21st century has seen a revolution in RNA biology, bringing with it the prospect of a new class of medicines based on RNA. What are the prospects for developing these RNA-based medicines for the growing medical problem of neurodegenerative disease and what are the challenges to making these…
19 March 2008 | By
The impact of biomarker technology and biomarker strategies in pharmaceutical development is still in its infancy; but the impact is already proving significant. Biomarker strategy forms the basis for personalised medicine, the industry/regulatory focus centres on improving the success rate and reducing the high attrition rate often encountered in early…
21 September 2007 | By Eric A. Miska, The Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Over the last ten years a small RNA revolution has swept biology. In 1998 RNA interference (RNAi) was discovered as an experimental tool by Andy Fire and Craig Mello, a finding that was awarded with the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Although the biology of RNAi is still…
21 July 2007 | By Jost Seibler, Head of Technology Development, Artemis Pharmaceuticals and Frieder Schwenk, Principal Scientist, University of Applied Science, Department of Applied Natural Sciences, Gelsenkirchen, Germany
Among the genetic model organisms, the laboratory mouse (Mus musculus) has a predominant role in the study of human disease and in pre-clinical drug development. Apart from the high degree of sequence homology of mouse and human genomes, and similarities in many physiological aspects, advanced targeting technologies make the crucial…
21 July 2007 | By Dr. Neil Clarke and Dr. Mark Edbrooke, GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development, Hertfordshire, UK
The archetypal microRNAs, lin-4 and let-7, were discovered in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans over a decade ago and, at that time, no one would have predicted that they would be anything other than an interesting feature of worm developmental biology. However, in recent years there has been an explosion…
23 May 2007 | By John J. Rossi, Division of Molecular Biology, Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, Graduate School of Biological Sciences, Duarte, United States
RNA interference (RNAi) is a regulatory mechanism of most eukaryotic cells that uses small double stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecules as triggers to direct homology-dependent control of gene activity (Almeida and Allshire 2005).
23 May 2007 | By Professor Stephen R Pennington, Proteome Research Centre, Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Sciences, University College Dublin
Until recently the use of proteomics in the biomedical arena has included programmes aimed at the elucidation of cellular responses to extracellular stimuli by known and potential drugs. It has been anticipated that these will lead to the elucidation of the basic mechanisms of cellular responses, potential identification of new…
27 March 2007 | By Claudio Carini, MD,PhD,FRCPath, F. VP of Translational Medicine, MDS Pharma
Biomarkers are useful characteristics to evaluate disease progress and targets of therapeutic agents. They are objectively measured and obtained by non-invasive procedures collecting readily accessible matrixes (Blood, CSF). Biomarkers should be easy to detect, specific and reproducible. Most importantly when detected early in the course of a disease they should…
28 November 2006 | By Irina Antonijevic, Douglas Craig and Christophe Gerald, Lundbeck Research USA, Inc.
Only a few innovations have been made in recent decades with regard to psychiatric, and particularly antidepressant, drugs (Insel et al., 2006) (Figure 1). This conundrum reflects, at least partly, the lack of understanding of the disease biology. This poses a challenge not only to inventive drug development, but also…
