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Many organizations are attempting to harness emerging digital technologies and the surge in the amount of health-related data to drive advances in the development and use of medicines. Focusing on just a few well-proven and readily available strategies could enable such organizations to quickly realize greater value from data and digital technologies.
John Jenkins, former Director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs, discusses approvals standards, breakthrough therapy designation and regulatory science hurdles.
This article analyses the huge volume of clinical trial activity for immune checkpoint inhibitors, and discusses the development of the market and strategic trends for immuno-oncology therapies in general.
The use of CRISPR–Cas technology for gene editing has rapidly become widespread. Here, Corn and colleagues discuss the applications of this revolutionary tool in drug discovery and development, describing how it could make substantial contributions to target identification and validation, animal models and cell-based therapies.
Small-molecule drug discovery has traditionally focused on occupancy of a binding site that directly affects protein function. This article discusses emerging technologies, such as proteolysis-targeting chimaeras (PROTACs), that exploit cellular quality control machinery to selectively degrade target proteins, which could have advantages over traditional approaches, including the potential to target proteins that are not currently therapeutically tractable.
Since the advent of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology a decade ago, human iPSCs have been widely used for disease modelling, drug discovery and cell therapy development. This article discusses progress in applications of iPSC technology that are particularly relevant to drug discovery and regenerative medicine, including the powerful combination of human iPSC technology with recent developments in gene editing.
DNA-encoded chemistry enables rapid and inexpensive syntheses and screening of vast chemical libraries, and is generating substantial interest and investment in the pharmaceutical industry. Here, Goodnow and colleagues provide an overview of the steps involved in the generation of DNA-encoded libraries, highlighting key applications and future directions for this technology.