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Clinical trial costs seem to be inflating excessively, without a clear increase in the value of the information gained. Here, we highlight factors that could be driving this trend and discuss potential solutions.
This Review discusses the mechanisms that regulate stabilization of hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs), and the pharmacological strategies to activate or inhibit HIFs in diseases such as ischaemia, inflammation, cancer, retinal neovascularization and pulmonary hypertension.
Several challenges hamper the translation of preclinical drug discovery efforts into safe and effective therapies for psychiatric disorders. In their Perspective, Khodosevich and colleagues highlight differences between drug targets in animal models and those in patients as a key reason for failed clinical studies. They present a framework that integrates single-cell and spatial omics data to overcome this loss in translation, which they hope will assist the development of new drugs for diseases such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder.
The TAM tyrosine kinase receptors TYRO3, AXL and MERTK regulate tissue and immune homeostasis. This Review discusses how their aberrant signalling is linked to diseases such as cancer, fibrosis and viral infection, and surveys the therapeutic landscape of TAM receptor inhibitors in preclinical and clinical development.
Advances with deep learning, the growth of databases of molecules for virtual screening and improvements in computational power have supported the emergence of a new field of quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) modelling applications that Tropsha et al. term ‘deep QSAR’. This article discusses key advances in the field, including deep generative and reinforcement learning approaches in molecular design, deep learning models for synthetic planning, and the use of deep QSAR models in structure-based virtual screening.
A diverse range of systems have recently been developed to promote the degradation of extracellular and membrane protein targets by using bispecific antibodies, conjugates or small molecules to traffic targeted proteins to the lysosome. This article describes and categorizes systems for extracellular targeted protein degradation, including LYTACs, ATACs, AbTACs, PROTABs and KineTACs, and discusses their advantages and the challenges ahead to realizing their therapeutic potential.