Volume 29 Issue 5, May 2011

Editorial

Inadequately met needs

Innovative drug development is already difficult, but it's particularly difficult in chronic diseases with existing treatments.

Editorial 06 May 2011

Advertisement

Top of page ⤴

News

PARP inhibitors stumble in breast cancer

Malini Guha
News 06 May 2011
Melanoma antibody approved

Ken Garber
News 06 May 2011
Human iPSC and ESC translation potential debated

Jeffrey L Fox
News 06 May 2011
$1.3 billion to translate

Jennifer Rohn
News 06 May 2011
Pharma wins vaccine case

Stephen Strauss
News 06 May 2011
Chinese biotechs wrestle with transparency, cultural hurdles

Hepeng Jia
Feng Tang
Brian Orelli
News 06 May 2011
OncoTrack tests drugs in virtual people

Markus Elsner
News 06 May 2011
Sequencing firms eye pathology labs as next big market opportunity

Laura DeFrancesco
Nidhi Subbaraman
News 06 May 2011
Flawed arithmetic on drug development costs

Nidhi Subbaraman
News 06 May 2011
Around the world in a month

News 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Data Page

Q1 strong out of the gates

Walter Yang
Data Page 06 May 2011
Drug pipeline: Q111

Wayne Peng
Data Page 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

News Feature

Peering inside Alzheimer's brains

Last year's failure of Eli Lilly's drug semagacestat in late-stage clinical trials was the latest in a long line of setbacks for novel Alzheimer's therapies. But advances in imaging and biomarker identification are providing added impetus to ongoing drug development. Gunjan Sinha reports.

Gunjan Sinha
News Feature 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Correspondence

Overhauling the reimbursement system for molecular diagnostics

Nafees N Malik
Correspondence 06 May 2011
Interaction databases on the same page

Andrei L Turinsky
Sabry Razick
Shoshana J Wodak
Correspondence 06 May 2011
PathSeq: software to identify or discover microbes by deep sequencing of human tissue

Aleksandar D Kostic
Akinyemi I Ojesina
Matthew Meyerson
Correspondence 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Commentary

Reforming direct-to-consumer advertising

Why not exploit direct-to-consumer advertising to facilitate patient education about treatments and improve safety monitoring?

Bryan A Liang
Tim Mackey
Commentary 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Patents

Mandating race: how the USPTO is forcing race into biotech patents

A recent review of select patent prosecutions before the United States Patent and Trademark Office indicates a troubling dynamic at work.

Jonathan Kahn
Patents 06 May 2011
Recent patent applications in biomarkers

Patents 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

News & Views

Building stronger microvessels

Therapeutic angiogenesis is enhanced by coaxing smooth muscle cells to wrap around endothelial-cell tubes.

Laura E Niklason
News & Views 06 May 2011
Sialidase inhibitors DAMPen sepsis

Sepsis can be ameliorated by small-molecule inhibitors of bacterial sialidases.

James C Paulson
Norihito Kawasaki
News & Views 06 May 2011
Auxin boost for cotton

Increasing auxin levels at the right time and place during ovule and fiber development improves the yield and quality of cotton fibers.

Z Jeffrey Chen
Xueying Guan
News & Views 06 May 2011
A self-assembling retina

Kathy Aschheim
News & Views 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Research Highlights

Research highlights

Research Highlights 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Analysis

Accelerated clinical discovery using self-reported patient data collected online and a patient-matching algorithm

The experiences of patients who try drugs that aren't approved for their disease have the potential to be mined for insights into drug efficacy. Wicks et al. rapidly monitored the efficacy of lithium treatment for 149 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis using an online data collection tool and a patient-matching algorithm.

Paul Wicks
Timothy E Vaughan
James Heywood
Analysis 24 Apr 2011

Top of page ⤴

Perspective

Minimum information about a marker gene sequence (MIMARKS) and minimum information about any (x) sequence (MIxS) specifications

Pelin Yilmaz
Renzo Kottmann
Frank Oliver Glöckner
Perspective 06 May 2011

Top of page ⤴

Article

Fibroblast growth factor 9 delivery during angiogenesis produces durable, vasoresponsive microvessels wrapped by smooth muscle cells

Frontini et al. propose to improve therapeutic angiogenesis by targeting perivascular smooth muscle cells rather than endothelial cells. They show that FGF9 causes smooth muscle cells to wrap around nascent endothelial tubes, generating blood vessels that are longer lasting and vasoreactive.

Matthew J Frontini
Zengxuan Nong
J Geoffrey Pickering
Article 17 Apr 2011
Amelioration of sepsis by inhibiting sialidase-mediated disruption of the CD24-SiglecG interaction

The sialic acid–dependent interaction of the co-inhibitory receptors CD24 and SiglecG prevents excessive inflammatory responses to pathogen infection. Chen et al. show that microbial sialidases exacerbate sepsis by disrupting this interaction and that sialidase inhibitors reduce mortality in an intestinal perforation mouse model of sepsis.

Guo-Yun Chen
Xi Chen
Yang Liu
Article 10 Apr 2011
Metabolic labeling of RNA uncovers principles of RNA production and degradation dynamics in mammalian cells

The relative contributions of RNA production, processing and degradation rates to cellular RNA levels are not well understood. Using pulsed metabolic RNA labeling of stimulated dendritic cells in conjunction with nCounter RNA quantification, RNA sequencing and computer modeling, Regev and colleagues unravel principles that determine RNA expression levels.

Michal Rabani
Joshua Z Levin
Aviv Regev
Article 24 Apr 2011

Top of page ⤴

Letter

Multiple targets of miR-302 and miR-372 promote reprogramming of human fibroblasts to induced pluripotent stem cells

Much work remains to be done to understand the ‘black box’ of reprogramming, which involves changes in the expression of thousands of genes. Subramanyam et al. identify microRNAs that promote human cell reprogramming and use them to identify key cellular pathways and processes.

Deepa Subramanyam
Samy Lamouille
Robert Blelloch
Letter 13 Apr 2011
Parallel on-chip gene synthesis and application to optimization of protein expression

High-throughput synthesis of long DNA molecules would open up new experimental paradigms in synthetic biology and functional genomics. Quan et al. take a step toward this goal by integrating oligonucleotide synthesis, amplification and gene assembly on a single microarray, and apply the technology to optimization of protein translation in a heterologous host.

Jiayuan Quan
Ishtiaq Saaem
Jingdong Tian

Collection:

Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University
Letter 24 Apr 2011
Spatiotemporal manipulation of auxin biosynthesis in cotton ovule epidermal cells enhances fiber yield and quality

It has been extremely challenging to simultaneously improve both the yield and quality of cotton by conventional breeding. Extensive field trials indicate that regulated expression of an auxin biosynthesis gene in the epidermis of cotton ovules improves both the number and fineness of cotton fibers.

Mi Zhang
Xuelian Zheng
Yan Pei
Letter 10 Apr 2011