Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2010

Highlighted by Genentech's recent US regulatory submission for trastuzumab–DM1, antibody–drug conjugation technology could be heading for the mainstream in anticancer drug development.

The controversy over the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia; GlaxoSmithKline), a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ agonist, has undermined confidence in developing drugs that target this family of nuclear receptors, but some companies still see promise in the field.

The new President and Chief Executive Officer of the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation discusses how his experience of leading Wyeth Vaccines will help the organization to reach its goal.

In June 2010, the taxane anticancer drug cabazitaxel (Jevtana; Sanofi–Aventis), in combination with prednisone, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of patients with hormone-refractory metastatic prostate cancer who had been previously treated with a regimen containing the taxane docetaxel.

A lack of entrepreneurial behaviour has often been identified as a contributor to the decline in the research and development (R&D) productivity of the pharmaceutical industry. Douglas and colleagues present an assessment of entrepreneurship in the industry, based on interviews with 26 former and current leaders of R&D departments at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, highlighting factors that could be important in promoting entrepreneurial behaviour and revitalizing R&D productivity.

The development of new protease inhibitors has proved challenging in recent years. In their Perspective, Drag and Salvesen discuss the underlying reasons for this, and how lessons learned from failures can inform future research directions in the field.

Cytokines — key instigators and regulators of immune responses — hold potential as targets for new therapeutic strategies. Here, Kopf and colleagues highlight some of the most effective and promising cytokine targets that have been linked to inflammatory diseases in preclinical and clinical studies and discuss some of the issues facing the development of cytokine-targeted drugs.

The incidence of invasive fungal infections is increasing, and there is an unmet need for new antifungal drugs. This article provides an overview of the history of antifungal drug discovery, discusses the current pipeline and presents new vaccination and immunotherapeutic approaches to treat fungal infections.

Carbon monoxide (CO) is increasingly being accepted as a cytoprotective and homeostatic molecule. Here, the authors review the physiology of CO, summarize the effects of CO gas and CO-releasing molecules in preclinical animal models of cardiovascular disease, inflammatory disorders and organ transplantation, and discuss the therapeutic development of this gaseous molecule.