Article
Featured Articles
Read our latest stories on the people and scientific innovations making a difference in patients’ lives.
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...
Designing Medicines to Go Where They're Needed: Lessons from Liver Targeting
Designing transformational medicines for patients requires them to be efficacious and safe. Sometimes, drug molecules have the desired effect in the organ of treatment and undesired effects in other organs, meaning one way to achieve a safer medicine is through directing the drug molecule to the place it is needed and minimizing exposure in the rest of the body. When you take a medicine, how does it “know” exactly where to go in the body to provide a therapeutic effect and which organs to avoid...
Purpose & Ideals
Connecting Patients to the Resources They Need
At Pfizer, we believe that patients should have access to the medicines they need. Which is why, for more than 30 years, Pfizer RxPathways has helped connect patients to a range of assistance programs that offer insurance support, co-pay help,[1] and medication for free or at a savings. Each year, we receive emails, cards, and phone calls from patients and caregivers across the country expressing their appreciation and gratitude for our services and support. Here are excerpts from...
Using "Molecular Glues" to Hijack the Body’s Garbage Disposal System
*/ /*-->*/ /*-->*/ Proteins are the stuff of life. They comprise the hormones, enzymes and many other molecules that are essential to our body’s functioning. But sometimes these loyal workhorses can go rogue, leading to cancer, autoimmune diseases and a variety of neurological conditions. Scientists who develop drugs are always looking for new ways to target these disease-related proteins — either to shut down their activities or to...
Moving Beyond Clinical Trials: 4 Lessons From Real-World Data
Clinical trials continue to be the gold standard for studying the safety and efficacy of a new medicine. They are designed to take place in very controlled environments, in a well-defined population, to understand the effects of a medicine on the specific patients; however, these experimental conditions don’t always represent “real world” settings. In recent years, drug makers, doctors and health insurance companies have been increasingly turning to real-world data to answer questions that...
Cytokines of Interest: Understanding Their Paths to Disease
In the diverse universe of cytokines, signaling proteins secreted by our cells that affect nearly every biological process in the body, there is a specific subset that scientists pay extra attention to for their role in autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other conditions. What sets apart these "cytokines of interest" — 57 in total — from others is that they’re dependent on a pair of enzymes called Janus kinases (JAKs) to transmit their messages to a cell. And in recent years, scientists have...
Touching Base: the Speed and Accessibility of Next Generation Sequencing
When German engineer Carl Benz took the world’s first automobile out for a spin in 1886, most observers were underwhelmed. With an engine that generated 0.75 horsepower and a top speed of 10 miles per hour, not many people rushed out to buy Benz’s first car. The $1000 price tag, an outrageous sum at the time, also discouraged all but the wealthiest would-be auto enthusiasts. But subsequent generations of cars not only got faster, they also became more affordable. By 1914 the Ford Model T had...
Scientific ‘Swap Meet’: Pharma Competitors Form Novel Consortium to Share Materials
Just as an amazing meal often begins with the best ingredients, the most innovative compounds are likely to emerge when scientists have access to diverse and high-quality chemical building blocks. But what are chemical building blocks? To understand that, first, you should know that one way in which chemists synthesize compounds is by combining smaller compounds. These smaller compounds are sometimes referred to as “building blocks” because they can be used to build larger compounds...
Unlocking the Secrets of a Protein “Superfamily"
Large families can be complex. And while you may know some of its members individually, you can’t really gain a true understanding of their relationships and dynamics without considering the group in its totality. Such is the case for solute carrier (SLC) transporters, a “superfamily” of some 400 proteins found in our cell membranes responsible for shuttling nutrients, neurotransmitters, medicines and other molecules in and out of cells. Despite their importance, they remain largely...
Matching Drugs to Diseases: Advances in Targeting JAKs Leading to New Autoimmune Therapies
Janus kinases (JAKs) named after Janus, the Roman two-faced god of duality, are enzymes with two “faces,” or domains, that play a key role in signal transduction of cytokines, the molecular messengers that trigger the inflammatory and immune responses. Scientific discoveries related to JAKs in recent years have led to novel treatments for autoimmune diseases and myeloproliferative disorders, a group of conditions where the bone marrow produces too many blood cells. In the early 2010s, the...
Using DNA ‘Barcodes’ in the Search for New Drugs
Organic lettuce, endangered sharks, and now, new medicines. In recent years, DNA ‘barcoding’ technology has exploded as a tool to quickly identify and track plants, animals and the tiniest of molecules. Just as barcodes are used to identify products at the grocery checkout, DNA ‘barcodes’ are small bits of DNA code that can be used to quickly recognize and monitor materials. In pharmaceutical labs around the world, scientists are using DNA-encoded compound libraries to screen billions of...
Inside the Toxicology Lab: From Guardians of the Genome to Bottleneck Breakers and Beyond
When it comes to creating new medicines, the stories that most often reach the public are the discoveries of new biological pathways or novel compounds. But in the nearly decade-long journey a medicine takes to get from the lab to patients, drug safety studies are an integral, though often behind-the-scenes, part of the process. We recently spoke with Pfizer scientists who work in various areas of toxicology to learn more about the critical jobs they do to get new medicines to patients. Here are...
Media Resources & Contact Information
Anyone may view our press releases, press statements, and press kits. However, to ensure that customers, investors, and others receive the appropriate attention, Pfizer Media Contacts may only respond to calls and emails from professional journalists.