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Health-care budgets are largely spent on treating the complications of chronic diseases, many of which have preventable risk factors. Here, we discuss some of the key issues in the necessary move towards a 'prevention model' of health care.
The lead author of the ASCO's draft guidelines to “raise the bar” for cancer clinical trials discusses the aims and potential impact of the guidelines on anticancer drug development.
Agarwal and colleagues present an analysis of the overlap in the drug targets that are being pursued across the industry, which indicates that more than half of the novel drug targets in current pipelines are being pursued by only one company.
Many clinical trial failures can be traced back to the limited predictive value of preclinical models of disease. Plenge and colleagues discuss how knowledge from human genetics, such as naturally occurring mutations in humans that affect the activity of particular proteins, can be used as a tool to more effectively prioritize molecular targets in drug development.
It has been 25 years since the hepatitis C virus (HCV) was discovered. Now, pipelines are bristling with exciting new direct-acting antiviral drugs, many of which are in late-stage clinical trials. In this Review, Manns and von Hahn examine the future of anti-HCV therapy, the prospect of all-oral interferon-free treatment regimens, and discuss the key challenges faced by clinicians and drug developers.
Members of the signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) protein family are implicated in a variety of diseases. In particular, aberrant activation of STAT3 is known to promote malignant transformation. In this Review, Turkson and colleagues discuss the various therapeutic approaches used to modulate the activation of the different STAT family members, which include dimerization inhibitors, tyrosine kinase inhibitors and DNA decoys.
Allosteric ligands bind to G protein-coupled receptors at a site distinct from the endogenous ligand. This Review discusses the potential advantages that allosteric ligands could hold, and highlights how the complexity of their actions provides both challenges and opportunities for drug screening.
