Article

How to Deal Dangerous Proteins a Knockout Blow

In the genteel game of croquet, the goal is deceptively straightforward: to hit your ball through a series of hoops before your opponent does. However, anyone who has picked up a mallet knows the sport can get downright cutthroat. A strong player with the right strategy can hit her opponent’s ball so far away that it essentially knocks him out of the game.That’s similar to what scientists are starting to do with certain types of harmful proteins in the body. Of course, most proteins aren’t bad...

Purpose & Ideals

How to Rid the World of Neglected Tropical Diseases

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) affect over one billion people worldwide. This group of viral, bacterial and parasitic diseases can be found in 149 countries – that’s 76 percent of countries in the world – and most often affects impoverished populations, who lack access to clean water or sanitation and live in close contact with infectious vectors. The effects of NTDs on communities can be devastating – keeping children out of school and preventing adults from going to work or caring for...

Banking on the British Exome

The vast UK Biobank is a treasure trove of genetic data. Scientists are mining it now for potential therapeutic gems.  Genetic discoveries that could help treat diseases require a large number of human subjects. That’s why the UK Biobank is such a boon to science: From 2006 to 2010, the Biobank, established by the Wellcome Trust medical charity along with other foundations and government agencies, managed a feat that is a biomedical researcher’s dream: It recruited 500,000 people between the...

May the Best Cell Win: How Scientists Choose One Champion Out of Millions

Making cells in the lab may not sound too dramatic, but under the microscope, what scientists call cell-line development can be even more competitive than the most cutthroat reality-show contests.  Adekunle Olatunbosun Onadipe, Associate Research Fellow in Pfizer’s Bioprocess Research and Development Group, leads the search for the best cell among the many cells that are made in his lab. The winning cell goes on to divide and grow into a large number of cells which will be used as tiny...

Inside the X-(Chromosome) Files

In honor of Mother’s Day, let’s take a closer look at the “female” sex chromosome: The X. Not to stir up a battle of the sexes, but the X chromosome (females have two of them, while males have one) is five times larger than the Y chromosome, and has 10 times the number of genes. That means it carries more traits — and diseases — than the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is important in determining a person’s biological gender. But it has much less of a say in someone’s genetic makeup, since the X...

Living & Wellbeing

Menopause

Menopause is the time in a woman’s life after she hasn’t had her period for 12 months. It is a normal part of aging; however, some women can go through menopause early as a result of surgery or chemotherapy. Women experience menopause differently, but some of the more common indications include hot flashes or vaginal symptoms.

Clinical Trials Meet the 'Real World'

As data sources proliferate, researchers are incorporating real world evidence in clinical trials.  Using real-world settings to test potential treatments is nothing new. In the 1950s the Salk field trial of the polio vaccine randomly assigned 750,000 children to receive either the newly formulated vaccine or a placebo.  While the Salk trial proved to be a success, testing potential therapies in the real world has been relatively rare over the ensuing 60 years. Now, with more health data...

Treating Disease with 'Precision Medicines' that Target Specific Patients

When people talk about curing cancer, an oncologist’s reaction likely is: What kind of cancer? If you answer “breast cancer,”  the oncologist will likely want to know which of its many varieties do you mean?  Precision medicine — the customization of treatments targeted to specific patient populations for specific ailments — has been made possible in recent years by advances in technology and the resulting breakthroughs in understanding how a given disease may differ among patients. Researcher...

Could Diversity in Clinical Trials Be the Key to Understanding Liver Disease?

In a New Yorker article about how evolutionary psychology findings are usually based on surveys of undergraduates, Anthony Gottlieb wrote, “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens.”  Biomedical research can suffer from a similar bias: Subjects don’t always represent the full range of patients in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. But why is it important to have diversity among subjects in clinical trials? One benefit is that involving a diverse...

advancing-medical-research

Patients as Partners in Developing New Medicines

With a growing emphasis on patient-reported outcomes, study volunteers are becoming active participants in evaluating a treatment’s efficacy. Since the first reported controlled clinical trial in 1747, when Scottish surgeon James Lind studied how eating oranges and lemons can cure scurvy among sailors at sea, patients have always been essential to expanding medical knowledge and developing new therapies. After all, no one knows your body like you do. But for the most part, patients have been...

Predictive Modeling in Clinical Trials: A Data-Backed Crystal Ball

In the business world, financial modeling has long been the go-to tool to predict the future performance of a company or investment. Now with the growing availability of big data, the pharmaceutical industry is increasingly turning to predictive modeling for a variety of tasks, from identifying new molecules for drug targets to forecasting clinical trial timelines.   For Mohanish Anand, Executive Director, Head of Study Optimization at Pfizer, predictive modeling is the bread and butter of what...

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...