Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Ranibizumab (Lucentis; Genentech), a humanized monoclonal antibody fragment that binds to vascular endothelial growth factor, was approved by the US FDA in June 2006 for the treatment of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration.
What constitutes a drug target? Imming and colleagues consider this question, and by classifying known drug substances on the basis of the discussed principles, provide an estimation of the total number of current drug targets.
In December 2005, sorafenib became the first new treatment to be approved for advanced renal cancer in more than a decade. Wilhelm and colleagues provide the history of this drug, which inhibits several kinases involved in tumour signalling and angiogenesis.
Schapira and colleagues describe recent advances in the development of novel doperminergic and non-doperminergic drugs for the treatment of Parkinson's disease and related motor complications.
Despite considerable progress in the treatment of paediatric leukaemias, a major need still exists for therapies for patients who relapse. Bonate and colleagues describe the discovery and development of the nucleoside analogue clofarabine, which is the first such drug approved for paediatric leukaemia in more than a decade, and the first to receive approval for paediatric use before adult use.
Inflammatory diseases of lung, liver, heart, joints and periodontium have high prevalence, but many current treatments have limited efficacy and are expensive. McCulloch and colleagues consider new anti-inflammatory drug targets based on the clustering of interleukin- 1 receptors into multi-protein aggregates associated with cell adhesions.
