It’s getting harder for the pharmaceutical industry to ignore neglected diseases. The globalization of national economies and the rise in air travel are increasing the potential for exposure to these diseases, which previously had been limited to the developing world. “Now is the time to have this discussion,” Kishor M. Wasan, chair-elect of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists’s Pharmaceuticals in Global Health Focus Group, told Pharmaceutical Technology earlier this month. Industry now seems to be getting the message. Read more »

As the unemployment rate hovers around 9.1%, the federal government needs to find ways to create jobs. Congress is debating whether a tax break on repatriated money would prompt companies to hire more workers, as I mentioned last week. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is eyeing another potential means of stimulating job growth: investing in biological research. Read more »

The development of an HIV vaccine is an important, but difficult goal, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently reported on an important advance in this area. One challenge in developing an HIV vaccine has been the difficulty in measuring how effective a vaccine is in producing an immune response. The MIT researchers have resolved that challenge by developing a high-throughput automated assay to evaluate individual T-cell response. Read more »

Ever since 1996, when scientists succeeded in cloning a sheep by transplanting the genetic material from an adult skin cell into an egg from which the genetic material had been removed, ethicists have been waiting for the other shoe to drop: If a sheep can be cloned, then surely human cloning cannot be far behind (1). In reality, cloning by somatic-cell nuclear transfer is a very difficult process. Even in species like sheep and mice where the process has been demonstrated, success rates are low, and there are many species—including humans—in which no one has been able to repeat the process. Read more »

Immunology was the focus of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with the October 3 announcement that the award will be shared by three whose work has been seminal in the understanding of immune system function.  Half the award will go to Drs. Jules A. Hoffmann and Bruce A. Beutler for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity, and the other half will go to the estate of Dr. Ralph M. Steinman for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. Read more »

It’s no secret that large pharmaceutical companies are shedding internal R&D staff, and turning towards in-licensing of promising molecules to bolster their early-stage pipelines. Generally, in-licensing candidates are molecules for which preclinical efficacy and safety studies have been done, and increasingly, those that have completed early-stage clinical studies. Eli Lilly, instead of looking entirely at late-stage chemical entities, has expanded a program that looks externally to mine the scientific community for promising preclinical leads. Read more »

Partnerships and strategic agreements are common in the pharma industry. Flicking through my inbox of the last few days I see Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ono, Catalent and Toyobo Biologics… both very sensible. But one particular announcement this week gave me cause to raise my eyebrows and smile.

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The senate appropriations bill released on September 20, 2011 contained a modest $190 million cut in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but also contained language creating the National Center for Advancing Translational Research (NCATS), a branch of the NIH devoted to translating basic science into treatment and cures for diseases. The purpose of the new center is not to develop new therapeutics, but to develop innovative tools and methods for drug development that will accelerate the development of medical products. In this way, NCATS will complement, and not compete with, the work of the private sector and other NIH translational science efforts. Read more »

Every now and then, media headlines become excited by a new potential ‘cure’ for cancer. Usually, this excitement stems from the results of very early research, which often involves a vegetable. Tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, sprouts and beetroot have all had their turn in the spotlight over the years. Read more »

As Congress returns from summer recess, and national campaigns begin, job creation is undoubtedly the theme for the near term. Debates over the role of government in stimulating economic growth through fiscal and regulatory policy are inviting opinions from all sides of the political spectrum. Despite all the contention that is and will continue to ensue, there is generally one agreed-upon precept: innovation is a valuable tool to create and sustain economic growth. But how does the quest for innovation square with government regulation? That debate is taking shape not only broadly but in the nascent field of synthetic biology, where scientific, public-health, and business interests are converging. Read more »