Oral contraceptive pills are currently only available for women. Recently, a compound purified from a Chinese herb is found to have the ideal properties of a male contraceptive drug: efficient, reversible and non-toxic. Could a male birth control pill finally be on the horizon? Continue reading A Potential Male Oral Birth Control Pill may be on the Horizon
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh used caffeine to understand how fungi become resistant to antifungal drugs. Continue reading Waking Up to Antifungal Drug Resistance
by Sebastian Rowe What would you do if I gave you $2.6 billion? For pharmaceutical companies, the answer is develop a drug. Not a handful, not a few… a single drug. $2.6 billion is the estimated development cost of each Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug. For perspective, 48 new medicines were FDA approved in 2019. Therefore, the total development cost of all the approved … Continue reading Modern Drug Discovery: Why is the drug development pipeline full of expensive failures?
by Christopher Gerry Our DNA influences our height, eye color, affinity for sky diving and other extreme thrills, sleep habits, disease risk factors, and more. It’s no surprise, then, that scientists have found another job for our reliable genetic ledger: as a tool to aid the discovery of new medicines. The hope is that these DNA-based tools will enable researchers to find better starting points … Continue reading Finding What Sticks
by Michael Vinyard figures by Nicholas Lue Most therapeutic drug candidates that are put through clinical trials fail. Given that most of these fail during early development, the cost of bringing a single drug to market is now over $2.5 billion. If we focus on cancer alone, this high cost of drug development, combined with the fact that cancer is one of the leading killers in … Continue reading CRISPR-Scanning Towards New Drugs — drug discovery is difficult, but CRISPR might be able to help
While you are likely familiar with the annoying experience of being a mosquito’s ‘meal of the day’, more is going on behind the scenes of that insect bite than meets the eye. Mosquitoes, which are drawn to human scent and breath, require proteins from the blood of their victims to develop their eggs and reproduce. This sounds harmless enough, but mosquitoes also excel at picking … Continue reading New Drug May Prevent Mosquitoes From Wanting to Bite You
Approximately 12% of Americans experience migraines. For some people, the attacks are so frequent and painful that episodes can be incapacitating. Historically, doctors have tried a variety of approaches to treating the condition, including drugs that numb nerves, medications that constrict blood flow, and as well as a variety of behavioral approaches. While some patients have found relief using these methods, many are not helped … Continue reading Migraines: Can New Antibody Treatment Help Stop Treatment Resistant Migraines
by Christopher Gerry The routes that lead to a career in biomedicine are as diverse as they are plentiful, but one of my colleagues has taken a particularly unorthodox path. Sonia had just graduated from law school when she learned of a “typo” in her genetic code that will almost certainly induce a fatal and untreatable brain disorder called prion disease. She and her husband, … Continue reading Risky Business: The far-reaching consequences of slashing the orphan drug tax credit
by Michael Vinyard figures by Jovana Andrejevic and Michael Vinyard Why do we have cures and medicines for some diseases but not others? Surprisingly, it is not because we cannot make the medicines; it is because we do not know enough about the diseases that need new medicines. To span the chasm between understanding the biology of a disease and successfully treating patients, we must foster … Continue reading Small-Molecule Probes: Bridging the gap between understanding and curing disease
It’s an all-too-common refrain nowadays, but antibiotic resistance remains one of the world’s most severe public health threats. Bacteria have developed resistance to nearly every antibiotic drug in our arsenal, and the Healthcare Infection Society has estimated that 10 million people will die annually from antibiotic-resistant bacteria by 2050. Hoping to reverse these worrying trends, researchers from Oregon State University and Sarepta Therapeutics have developed … Continue reading Reversing Resistance: How to teach old antibiotics new tricks