List view / Grid view
9 October 2009 | By
Pharmacodynamic biomarkers in drug discovery: Developing a new drug is an expensive and time-consuming business1-3. A substantial part of the overall cost of drug development is the investment in molecules that fails at some point during the development process and it is necessary to identify these compounds as early as possible.…
30 July 2009 | By
The field of oligonucleotide-based therapy experienced a revival with the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) in 19981. RNAi is a conserved endogenous mechanism, which is triggered by double-stranded (ds) RNAs leading to target-specific inhibition of gene expression by promoting mRNA degradation or translational repression. There are two RNAi pathways that…
29 May 2009 | By
In established economies, mental disorders account for a larger burden of disease than all cancers combined. Yet reliable, measurable, markers of such diseases (biomarkers) are not uniformly known and without them, prediction that a new drug candidate makes contact with its target is poor. This is unfortunate because the attrition…
20 March 2009 | By
For years biologists have worked to develop alternatives to traditional therapeutics. These efforts, in areas such as stem cell based and gene therapies, have received much fanfare in popular media outlets, raising expectations among the general public. This excitement may have contributed to the hasty progression of early gene therapy…
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…
