Volume 8 Issue 11, November 2009

With five novel oral therapies in late-stage development, there could soon be a wide range of treatment options for relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis, but better biomarkers are needed to more effectively address the challenge of treating progressive forms of the disease.

Phase III trial results for three anti-obesity therapies suggest that they meet at least some of the efficacy benchmarks for regulatory approval, although questions remain about the value of the benefits offered.

The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron discusses the institute's multidisciplinary approach to innovation.

Drug repurposing, in which an established active pharmaceutical ingredient is applied in a new way — for example, in a new presentation, often combined with a new therapeutic indication — is an evolving strategy for pharmaceutical R&D. This article discusses each aspect of this strategy, highlighting commercial successes that have arisen from a focus on the presentation and therapeutic use of known active ingredients or slight variations of these compounds.

The emerging resistance to current antimalarial drugs calls for new strategies to control the disease. This article highlights the potential of targeting the obligate short-lived hepatic forms of the malaria parasite and ways to overcome the challenges of developing drugs that will achieve this.

Here, the authors use bibliometrics and related data-mining methods to analyse PubMed abstracts, literature citation data and patent filings. The analyses are used to identify trends in disease-related scientific activity that are likely to give new therapeutic opportunities.

The recent call for the eradication of malaria has sparked the development of new drug classes with improved product profiles. Wells and colleagues review the currently available antimalarials and their limitations, the contribution of genome-based technologies andin vitroscreening of whole parasites to the discovery of new targets, and the issues that should be considered when developing such antimalarials.

Although protein kinases are proving to be valuable therapeutic targets for various peripheral-tissue disorders, the development of kinase-targeted therapies for central nervous system (CNS) diseases remains a challenge. Here, Chico and colleagues discuss the issues associated with CNS drug discovery, present trends in small-molecule properties associated with blood–brain barrier penetrance and review emerging CNS protein kinase targets and compounds in development.