Many of the blockbuster biological products that currently dominate the markets are coming to the end of their patent protection. The opportunity to provide more affordable “generic” versions is now attracting the interest of both generic and research-based pharmaceutical companies. The development of “generic” biological medicines referred to as “biosimilars” in Europe and increasingly in […]
Organismic assays are better and more predictive for testing putative therapeutics than molecular assays, but it is difficult and expensive to work with animals, and the relevance of these assays’ results in humans is often low. Human cell-based assays-which are less complicated than many organismic assays-are an attractive option for drug screening because cells are […]
Proteomics is an emerging field that is frequently used for clinical biomarker discovery. For this article, proteomics is defined as a mass spectrometry-based approach used to identify proteins. The biomarker discovery process is distinct from biomarker validation or the development of a clinical test. The development of a clinical biomarker incurs heavy expenditure and also […]
The advent of modern drug discovery techniques such as quantitative structure-activity relationships, combinatorial and high-throughput chemistry has contributed to this quest. The Lipinski Rule of 5 and variants thereof, acknowledge that potential drug molecules tend to be more lipophilic with logP values up to 5 and sometimes higher. Water solubility-enhancing formulation strategies have therefore become […]
Ion channels have been excellent drug discovery targets for decades with clinically meaningful drugs identified targeting sodium channels, including (e.g. lamotrigine), calcium channels (e.g. amlopdipine), GABA receptors (e.g. diazepam) and ATP-gated potassium channels (e.g. glipizide) and several others. However, new ion channel modulators have not been emerging at a rapid pace in the recent years, […]