From thalidomide to resveratrol, molecules with the exact same chemical properties can have drastically different effects in the body depending on how they’re arranged in space.
Around 75% of antibiotics, including penicillin and amphotericin B, are derived from natural products.
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With the dual threats of antibiotic resistance and emerging pandemics, finding new drugs becomes even more urgent. A trove of medicines may be lying under our nose.
Depending on how you look at it, drugs that can act on multiple targets could be a boon instead of a challenge.
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Gregory Way, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Many approved drugs work on the body in ways that researchers still aren’t entirely clear about. Seeing this as an opportunity instead of a flaw may lead to better treatments for complex conditions.
A new polymer could help the medicine go down easier.
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While pills are more practical than injections or infusions, digestion in the stomach prevents many drugs from being taken orally. Better drug design could change this.
While pills come in many shapes and sizes, they all eventually reach your bloodstream and travel throughout your body.
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Tom Anchordoquy, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
From tablets and patches to ointments and infusions, the best way to deliver a drug is the one that gets the right amount to the right place.
Global Justice campaigners in London stand by fake coffins to highlight global COVID-19 deaths. If pharma companies waived intellectual property rights, it would be easier for low- and middle-income countries to access COVID-19 vaccines.
(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Ronald Labonte, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Waiving patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines and drugs is still crucial to ensure access globally, but the waiver on the table at the June World Trade Organization meeting doesn’t do the job.
It is possible to grow cells from a skin sample in a Petri dish and transform them into neurons in about a month.
(Camille Pernegre)
Cell cultures have shown promise in representing diseases. The Petri dish is not as different from a sick person as one might think.
Pan-assay interference compounds, or PAINS, often come up as false positives when researchers screen for potential drug candidates.
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Drug repurposing can redeem failed treatments and squeeze out new uses from others. But many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to retool existing drugs without a high return on investment.
The majority of drug failures are attributed to lack of clinical efficacy and high toxicity.
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Drug development is a long and costly process that often ends in failure. Improving the way potential drug candidates are optimized could help boost success rates.
If no action is taken to address antibiotic resistance, infections from multidrug-resistant bacteria could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050.
While ivermectin was originally used to treat river blindness, it has also been repurposed to treat other human parasitic infections.
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Ivermectin has been a lifesaving drug for people with parasitic infections like river blindness and strongyloidiasis. But taking it for COVID-19 may result in the opposite effect.
Many catalysts currently used to make many drugs are expensive and can produce toxic byproducts.
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The path to using old drugs for COVID is full of potholes. So why are we using the same old flawed methods when we actually know what works?
The pipes imprinted on microfluidic chips are about the size of a human hair, and in many ways are like miniaturizing a chemical manufacturing plant.
(Katherine Elvira)
Artificial cells on tiny microfluidic chips can provide early insight into how new cancer drugs behave in cells, and why certain kinds of cancer are more resistant to chemotherapy treatment.
The average price for an orphan drug is more than $150,000 per year.
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Whether you are predicting the outcome of an election or studying how effective a new drug is, there will always be some uncertainty. A margin of error is how statisticians measure that uncertainty.
The number one scientific breakthrough for 2020: multiple vaccines to prevent COVID-19.
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The development of multiple vaccines against the virus that causes COVID-19 has been hailed as the breakthrough of 2020. But there were many more supporting discoveries that made this possible.