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Regulatory agencies have a key role in facilitating the development of new drugs for Alzheimer disease, particularly given the challenges associated with early intervention. Here, we summarize the strategies of the European Medicines Agency to help address such challenges.
The US National Institutes of Health's US$240-million epigenomics investment could improve the study of disease biology, the identification of new targets, the validation of animal models and more.
A beleaguered class of epigenetic modulators continues to struggle for oncology success, but new insights into their mechanisms in cancer may yet offer hope.
Several new drugs have recently been approved for the treatment of breast cancer, and this analysis provides a market outlook as well as an insight into the pipeline of agents in late-stage development.
Drug delivery methods that use targeted polymeric nanoparticles have the potential to increase local concentrations of a drug while reducing off-target accumulation. To best achieve this goal, Saltzman and colleagues argue that a holistic approach should be taken, in which anatomical, molecular and temporal aspects of the nanoparticle, drug and disease are taken into consideration.
Microengineered cell culture systems are becoming sufficiently sophisticated that they can recapitulate many of the phenomena observed in tissues and organisms. Here, Huh and colleagues discuss the advances made in these 'organs-on-chips' and how they could be used in drug development, including target identification and validation, toxicity screening and stratified medicine.
Dysregulation of mRNA translation is a frequent occurrence in cancer cells, and several components of the translation machinery have emerged as promising targets for anticancer therapeutics. This Review discusses the mechanisms of aberrant mRNA translation in cancer cells and provides an overview of drugs in development that target the translation machinery.
The recent growth in the number of academic drug discovery centres is providing new opportunities to couple the curiosity-driven research culture in academia with rigorous preclinical drug discovery practices used in industry. To realize the potential of these opportunities, it is important that academic researchers understand the risks in several key areas — including organization, target selection, assay design, medicinal chemistry and preclinical pharmacology — which are discussed in this article.
