As antibiotic resistance increases globally, the heat is on to find new alternatives to treat infections. Chemists can get a head start by looking at compounds produced in nature by fishes’ microbes.
Mental health is impacted by both genetic and environmental factors. But new research reveals that many mental health disorders may flow from early disturbances in fetal development.
People with Down syndrome are at much higher risk of dementia than the general population. Knowing when cognitive changes start is critical for developing new drugs.
Small-batch brewers are starting to tinker with biologic drugs to meet their own medical needs. A side effect of their success would be a disruption to how big pharma makes and distributes drugs.
There’s a common, popular and well-studied method to ensure new technologies are safe and effective for public use – even if researchers don’t fully understand how they work.
Pharmaceutical companies focus on small molecules they’ve devised – and can easily patent. But nature’s already come up with many antibacterial compounds that drug designers could use to make medicines.
Researchers use an algorithm designed to help robots move to figure out what’s possible when designing new molecules in a promising class of pharmaceuticals.
With the right investment, an open source drug discovery system might compete with the traditional pharmaceutical industry to deliver the drugs we need.
Professor and Director of Quantitative Biosciences Institute & Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, University of California, San Francisco