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The Senior Vice President of Medicines Discovery and Development at GlaxoSmithKline discusses the rationale for the recent evolution of the company's research and development strategy.
Developing optimal combination strategies for molecularly targeted anticancer drugs is substantially more complex than for traditional chemotherapies. Here, Doroshow and colleagues discuss the lessons learned from the evaluation of combinations of molecularly targeted anticancer agents by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), and highlight several new approaches that the NCI has initiated to improve the effectiveness of such combinations.
Currently, drug development is based on a consecutive phase model and Phase I clinical trials often have tolerability as their primary objective. Here, Cohen advocates new concepts for drug development that are based on pharmacological knowledge about the effects of the drug and an adaptive, cyclical development process.
Understanding the factors that promote drug innovation is important both for improvements in health care and the future of organizations engaged in the field. To investigate these factors, Kneller identifies the inventors of 252 new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 1998 to 2007 and their places of work, and classifies these drugs according to innovativeness. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of these data, which highlight the strong contribution of biotechnology companies, particularly in the United States, to innovative drug discovery, and discusses potential contributing factors to the trends observed.
In September 2010, fingolimod (FTY720/Gilenya; Novartis) became the first oral disease-modifying therapy to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis. Brinkmann and colleagues describe its discovery and development, and how elucidation of its effects on sphingosine 1-phosphate receptors has improved the understanding of the biology of these receptors.
