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Science & Innovation
Attacking Cancer Cells That Develop Resistance
By Get Science Staff - This article originally published on Get Science When cancer patients receive therapy for an extended time, they often face the specter of drug resistance as tumor cells mutate and find ways to evade the cancer-killing medicines. Exploring new ways to disarm rogue cells that have developed resistance is a major field of modern cancer research. One way to address the issue of resistance is to attack cancer through the fundamental processes that drive their core...
From Nĭ Hăo to Better Potential Medicines: How Language Translation Technology Is Being Applied to Drug Design
This is the first in a two-part series. If you’ve ever used Google Translate, you’ve seen how the app can effortlessly translate between two very different languages, such as going from English to Chinese. Now, the same technology is being applied to a new challenge: building better medicines. This technology, known as sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq), is a type of machine learning framework behind many of the language-processing apps we use today — from Siri and Alexa to customer service...
Capturing the Itch: Using Digital Wearable Devices to Help Patients with Atopic Dermatitis
For people who have atopic dermatitis (AD) — an autoimmune condition that causes painful, itchy, and inflamed skin — symptoms often flare up at night, leading to disrupted sleep. Until recently, there hasn’t been a way to truly capture how much a person’s quality of life is impacted by these nighttime symptoms. Patients enrolled in studies are asked to complete sleep journals, but these self-reports are based on recall and are often not fully accurate. To address this issue, Pfizer’s Digital...
Science & Innovation
Collection and Use of Real-World Data Continues to Grow Around the World
Conducting real-world data (RWD) analyses to generate real-world evidence (RWE) is a growing practice in the healthcare community. RWE provides helpful information that complements clinical trial findings and may help fill knowledge gaps related to how a medication is used in real-world medical settings. These data consist of de-identified patient-related data collected from various sources, including but not limited to, anonymized electronic medical records, claims databases, health surveys...
How Quantum Physics and AI is Disrupting Drug Discovery & Development
When a new molecule is a potential drug candidate, scientists want to learn as much about the molecule as possible; its shape, size and other properties down to the electron level. To do this they have traditionally used a technique called X-ray crystallography. In a multi-step, time-consuming process the compound is converted into crystal form and then an X-ray beam is shot through it to determine its 3-D structure.In recent years, scientists have begun using a computer modelling technique...
What an Artificial Eating Machine Can Teach Us About Medications
The old saying “you are what you eat” may not be strictly accurate, but like many a timeworn adage, it holds a kernel of truth. For example, while eating a high-fat diet may not necessarily make people fat, the amount and type of fat in their diets still influences their overall health. When people think about the relationship between eating and health, however, they rarely consider how their dietary habits could affect the medications they take. Many common medications come in tablet...
Quantifying Matters of the Heart: Using Mathematical Modeling to Simulate Vital Organs
Songwriters, poets, and novelists have long tried to capture the intricacies of the heart. But it’s the quants who might finally do it. The Living Heart Project, initiated by the firm Dassault Systémes, is applying the advanced technology that the automotive and aerospace industries use to realistically simulate the heart. The project has solicited input from cardiovascular researchers, biopharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, regulatory agencies and practicing doctors to develop a model...
Artificial Intelligence: On a mission to Make Clinical Drug Development Faster and Smarter
Just as Industrial Revolution-era factory builders developed machines to mass-manufacture drugs once ground by hand, today’s pharmaceutical companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to both speed and smarten the work of clinical development. AI could assist pharma companies in getting medicines to market faster. AI today not only does flashy gene-sequencing work, it’s being trained to predict drug efficacy and side effects, and to manage the vast amounts of documents and data that...
Better, Faster, Smaller: How an Advance in Microfluidics Can Speed Up Drug Discovery
Before preparing a new recipe for 20 guests at Thanksgiving, the smart cook starts small, making the dish for their immediate family to test things out before the big holiday dinner. What does a scientist do when attempting to discover a molecule that has the properties that potentially could be a miracle cure for diabetes, high blood pressure or another troublesome disease? She also starts small, testing the molecule to make sure it’s safe and effective in living cells. Increasingly...
Cryo-Electron Microscope Opens Resolution Revolution for Biological Imaging
The history of microscopes is one of ever higher magnification, enabling scientists to peer deeper and deeper into the minute details of nature invisible to the naked eye. The latest category of this powerful tool is what’s called a cryo-electron microscope, and its groundbreaking properties are revolutionizing the way scientists are imaging the smallest of structures — especially in the life sciences. The cryo-electron microscope, or cryo-EM, is allowing scientists to image structures as...
A New Frontier for AI: Helping Scientists Develop Potential New Medicines
When Google’s artificial intelligence program known as AlphaGo decisively beat the reigning human champion of the ancient board game of Go in a series of high-profile matches in 2016, it was a watershed moment in the field of machine learning. And while much has been made of impressive feats of artificial intelligence (AI), like AlphaGo and self-driving cars, a lesser known fact is that the same techniques are also helping scientists explore potential new medicines. The link between AI and drug...
advancing-medical-research
3-D Molecules Move into the Fast Lane
Seeing compounds in three dimensions clears a path for making medicines faster, better. Understanding how medicines behave around human cells was once a matter of educated guesswork, in large part because how they act at the molecular level isn’t visible. But today, structural biology and computational chemistry – or the use of computer modeling and molecular dynamics simulation – take medicine design into the next dimension. Well, to be precise, the third dimension. With the jump into 3...
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