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Read our latest stories on the people and scientific innovations making a difference in patients’ lives.
How a Former Neuroscience Researcher Is on a Mission to Close the Diversity Gap in Clinical Trials (Q&A)
When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently gave a presentation on diversity in clinical trials, Dr. Ricardo Rojo wasn’t surprised to hear that — at least for medicines where gender is not overtly relevant — research participants today are predominantly white men. Rojo, Pfizer’s first Global Lead for Diversity in Clinical Trials, is on a mission to change this. For years, the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry and various stakeholders have been working to improve racial, ethnic...
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...
Medicine’s 2-Way Dance: What a Drug Does to the Body and What the Body Does to a Drug
We all know that a tremendous amount of brain power, time and resources goes into creating a new medicine. While much attention is given to the “discovery” aspect of translating scientific insights into new therapies, an equally important part of the process involves studying how a potential new medicine will affect the human body and what is the safest and most effective dose. Caption These questions are addressed by clinical pharmacologists, scientists who specialize in studying what...
The ‘Immortalized’ Cells That Sparked an International Incident and Their Role in Producing Medicines
Proteins are the rock stars of biological molecules. They allow cells to carry out crucial functions like growth and differentiation, and enable cells to adapt to changing environments. Because dysfunction in certain proteins can cause disease, manipulating proteins is also the foundation of developing new medicines. But where do we get enough building blocks to actually manufacture the medicines that patients take? It turns out that living cells—which make proteins as part of a day’s work...
How Finland’s Unique Genetic Heritage Is Being Used to Study the Links Between Genes and Diseases
The unique genetic heritage of the Finns — marked by repeated population bottlenecks and isolation from their neighbors in northern Europe — is helping scientists embark on a search for the complex links between genes and diseases. Finland also has a robust network of biobanks, and the country has passed laws that make the voluminous biobank data accessible to researchers. The combination of those two factors has set the stage for the FinnGen study, which began in the fall of 2017 and will...
Hiding In The Crowd: Designing Therapies To Evade Immune Detection
Using computer modeling and DNA sequencing, scientists are building better biologic medicines that are potentially invisible to the immune system. Biologic medicines have greatly improved the lives of many patients, in particular with chronic autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even some cancers. But the challenge with these protein-based medicines, which are made from living cells, is that some patients, over time, develop an immune...
Advanced Culture: Making More ‘Life-Like’ Cellular Models
Cellular models, an essential part of developing new medicines, are becoming more realistic and relevant to patients. Long before a drug candidate enters clinical trials to be tested in humans, it goes through countless rounds of testing over several years in cellular models, also known as cell-based assays. From the earliest stage of identifying active molecules that can interact with a disease target to the later stages of testing toxicity and dosing, cells, particularly human cells, are...
When Bacteria Outsmart Antibiotics, Surveillance Can Help Battle Resistance
The problem of so-called “superbugs” has emerged as a serious public health issue, with bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or carbapenem-resistant Enteriobacteriaceae (CRE) among the pathogens that cause infections resistant to multiple antibiotics. But what is antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how do bacteria become resistant to antibiotics? How Microbes Can Outsmart Antibiotics The machinery inside of a bacterial cell makes the bacteria less...
Reducing the Pull of Memories to Fight Drug Addiction Relapse
Researchers are working to prevent drug relapse by reducing the powerful tug of drug-associated memories. While some may believe that beating addiction is just a matter of willpower, scientific evidence has established that drug addiction is a chronic illness that produces lasting changes to the brain’s chemistry and function. Some 40 to 60 percent of people treated for substance abuse disorders will eventually relapse, according to a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association...
How Fragment-Based Drug Screening Is Like the ‘Tetris’ of Drug Design
An alternative approach to drug screening searches for small fragments that snugly fit into a protein drug target. For more than two decades, high throughput screening (HTS) has been the main technique used to begin the process of developing new drugs. Often described as the “needle in the haystack” approach, HTS involves screening about a million compounds against a disease target — usually proteins — that are found in the body. It’s like a matchmaking game: the goal is to find a drug...
advancing-medical-research
Fixing Broken Body Clocks
By finding ways to restore sleep rhythms, researchers can benefit Alzheimer’s patients and others. Every living being from fungi to frogs has an internal clock that normally runs on a 24-hour cycle. In humans, this master clock resides in a tiny region of the brain’s hypothalamus and controls everything from hunger and sleep patterns to daily hormone fluctuations and body temperature. The brain’s master clock sets the tempo for the rhythms of every cell throughout the whole body. “It’s like...
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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