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Read our latest stories on the people and scientific innovations making a difference in patients’ lives.
Drug Makers Recruit Patients With Specific DNA for Precision Medicine Trials
Precision medicine is an evolving field focused on bringing more precisely targeted medicine to more precisely targeted patients. The goal is to identify specific subgroups of patients, and match them to a customized treatment that potentially could be transformative. Advances in genetic analysis, the use of AI to analyze patient data, and new drug discovery techniques are making precision treatments much more possible to develop and deliver. But there’s a huge hurdle between research lab and...
Getting a Medicine to the Brain Is a Major Challenge in Drug Design: How This Scientist Solved It
For cancer patients who have been treated with a particular medicine for some time, one of the hurdles many of them face is the tumor developing a resistance to the medicine. It’s a cruel twist that can affect patients being treated for non-small cell lung cancer, which can mutate and begin attacking the brain. Lung cancer accounts for most cancer-related deaths in the U.S., with non-small cell lung cancer being the most common type,, so the scope of the problem is broad. But if lung cancer...
Decoding the Mind-Blowingly Complex Logistics of Supplying Experimental Medicines for Clinical Trials
Ever wonder how researchers keep human bias out of clinical trials? Or how the millions of units of experimental medicine that go to patients all over the globe are tracked? It starts even before the medicines are shipped out. For any major pharmaceutical company that provides potential medicines to hundreds, or even thousands, of clinical trials being conducted all over the globe at any given time, the complications of the task are truly staggering. Not only do the potential medicines have to...
How the Placebo Effect Can Cloud Clinical Trial Results
When researchers design a clinical trial, they can’t ignore the powerful—and often bizarre—placebo effect. Since ancient times, healers have known the power of the mind-body connection — specifically, the mind’s ability to influence how the body feels. This influence can at times be so strong that the treatment doesn’t even have to be “real” for the patient’s symptoms to subside. This is the placebo effect, and it’s a very real phenomenon, both in the lab and in the doctor’s office. In fact...
‘Bucket Brigades’ Gone Rogue: A New Path to Shutting Down Cancer Growth
A critical pathway in our cells acts like a bucket brigade, efficiently passing on signals that control cellular growth. But what happens when one set of “hands” on the line goes rogue? The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is a chain of proteins that relays signals from outside the cell into the nucleus, controlling cellular growth and death. When this essential pathway malfunctions, it may lead to more than just chaos—it may determine how cancer progresses. If one of these...
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 and...
How Preparing a Drug for FDA Approval Requires the Mind of a Scientist and Strategist
Regulatory experts draw upon both scientific and strategic thinking to shepherd new drugs to the finish line. Every drug that is prescribed by a doctor must first be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or its regulatory counterparts in Europe, Asia and around the globe. If a drug is successful in clinical trials, then a New Drug Application (NDA) is submitted to the regulatory agency, where it undergoes a final approval process that can take up to a year. But regulatory experts...
The Action-Packed Search for Stability: A Breakthrough in the Fight Against RSV
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a major global childhood infectious disease without a vaccine, kills approximately 120,000 infants a year worldwide. It’s the most common reason infants are hospitalized. Additionally, RSV sickens millions of elderly people each year.When most people catch RSV, they get a mild cold and recover quickly. But some — especially infants and the elderly — can get very sick. Infants can develop pneumonia or bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the small airways in their...
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, this...
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...
Prized Research Skill? Fluency in Computer Science and Biology
How Computational Biology Is Driving Treatment Breakthroughs Growing up in South India, Shobha Potluri only knew of two acceptable career paths—engineer or doctor. She chose an engineering college in her home state of Andhra Pradesh and zeroed in on computer science. When she went on to get her master’s degree, she had a career-changing moment when she learned that her “geek” skills could be applied to solve biological problems, and help develop better treatments for sick people. Potluri...
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...
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