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Volume 16 Issue 4, April 2010

Counterfeit drugs are a growing blight on the pharmaceutical landscape. Our special News focus examines the ongoing international efforts to force out fakes. Cover illustration: Eric Collins (www.oobust.com).

Editorial

  • The path of drug development is fraught with hurdles. Gaining a clear understanding of how a drug works before it enters clinical trials is the intelligent route to drug discovery and could increase the likelihood for drug success.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • Lax laws mean that drug counterfeiters often receive light punishments and companies can remain silent when they suspect bogus medicines in the supply chain. Winning the fight against fakes requires getting tough.

    Editorial
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News

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Correction

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News

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Opinion

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Book Review

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News & Views

  • Activation of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) via a nuclear protein released from dying cells, high-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) protein, leads to chronic epilepsy in rat models and in human epileptic tissue. Blocking this inflammatory pathway may constitute a new antiepileptic treatment strategy (pages 413–419).

    • Jonathan K Kleen
    • Gregory L Holmes
    News & Views
  • Thalidomide, a drug reviled in the 1960s for its teratogenic effects, has been revived in recent years for cancer and leprosy therapy. A study now finds another use for this drug in vascular disease, providing further insights into the drug's mechanisms of action (pages 420–428).

    • Rosemary J Akhurst

    Nature Outlook:

    News & Views
  • The HIV drug raltegravir, which blocks viral integration into the genome, results in a transient increase in episomes, circularized HIV DNA. The findings suggest that persistent HIV replication occurs in people on antiretroviral therapy. Measuring episomes may also offer a new method to study viral persistence and latency and to gauge the effectiveness of antiviral regimens (pages 460–465).

    • Timothy Schacker
    News & Views
  • Two reports in this issue identify a link between insulin action and the unfolded protein response—a pathway that helps the endoplasmic reticulum cope with cellular stress (pages 429–437 and 438–445). The results expand our understanding of the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and provide new targets for prevention and treatment of obesity.

    • Ronald C Wek
    • Tracy G Anthony
    News & Views
  • Fewer than half of patients with multiple sclerosis respond to interferon-b, one of the most widely prescribed therapies. The discovery that different subtypes of T cells may be involved in disease development in each affected individual suggests that it may be possible to predict therapeutic success by determining a patient's cytokine profile (pages 406–412).

    • Hartmut Wekerle
    • Reinhard Hohlfeld
    News & Views
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Community Corner

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Between Bedside and Bench

  • Blood transfusion saves many lives but carries the risk of injury, such as severe damage to the lungs. In 'Bedside to Bench', Janet S. Lee and Mark T. Gladwin examine the implications of clinical studies assessing such damage. The risk of injury seems to increase with the number of units transfused and may be greater with blood that has been stored longer. Researchers have yet to understand why, but several mechanisms are under scrutiny. In 'Bench to Bedside', Paul S. Frenette and Narla Mohandas discuss recent studies pinpointing a trigger—a specific antigen on neutrophils for a severe form of transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI). The findings could lead to new ways to diagnose TRALI and identify people at risk.

    • Janet S Lee
    • Mark T Gladwin
    Between Bedside and Bench
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Research Highlights

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Commentary

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Brief Communication

  • Proper body weight is determined by orexigenic and anorexigenic neurons in the hypothalamus. Lori Zeltser and her colleagues have found that a subset of neurons in the developing hypothalamus expressing a potent orexigenic hormone is derived from precursors expressing an anorexigenic hormone. These results suggest that developing feeding circuits are more plastic than previously thought and give rise to new concerns about the effects of a mother's diet during pregnancy on her offspring.

    • Stephanie L Padilla
    • Jill S Carmody
    • Lori M Zeltser
    Brief Communication
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Article

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Letter

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Technical Report

  • A technique for expanding hematopoietic stem cell numbers could have many clinical applications, including improving bone marrow transplantation and recovery from myelotoxic chemotherapy. In this report, Heather Himburg et al. suggest a new strategy to accomplish this by identifying pleiotrophin, a growth factor not previously known to affect hematopoiesis, as an inducer of both mouse and human hematopoietic stem cell expansion ex vivo and of hematopoietic stem cell regeneration in vivo.

    • Heather A Himburg
    • Garrett G Muramoto
    • John P Chute
    Technical Report
  • McMillin et al. describe a drug screening platform that takes into account the tumor microenvironment, in particular tumor-stromal interactions, enabling the screening of the antitumor activity of candidate anticancer agents in the context of such interactions. The in vitro tumor cell–specific bioluminescence imaging assay is both high throughput and scalable.

    • Douglas W McMillin
    • Jake Delmore
    • Constantine S Mitsiades
    Technical Report
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