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Academic research has a key role in identifying new drug targets, but to lead to new drugs this research must progress to testing drug candidates in clinical trials, which are typically conducted by industry. This Perspective presents a framework to support academic scientists and funders in prioritizing target assessment activities and in defining a critical path to reach scientific goals as well as goals related to licensing, partnering with industry or initiating clinical trials.
Phase 0 approaches, including microdosing, evaluate subtherapeutic exposures to novel drugs, potentially enabling safer, cheaper and quicker first-in-human studies. Here, Burt et al. discuss the fundamentals and applications of phase 0 approaches, highlight the potential advantages of their application in drug development and address the associated limitations.
Dendritic cell vaccines have been widely investigated as a type of cancer immunotherapy, but their promise has not yet been realized. Kandalaft and colleagues propose that a prime and boost approach — primed with either standard therapies or dendritic cell vaccines and boosted with a personalized synthetic vaccine — could help fulfil the potential of such vaccines. They discuss improvements in dendritic cell vaccines that have enabled prime–boost approaches, as well as challenges for adoption.
