drug development

You booked this doctor’s appointment weeks in advance. You took off work, endured the trip here, filled out paperwork while a cooking show blared from a TV on the wall, and now you’re finally in the inner sanctum, awkwardly perched on an exam table and staring at a jar of tongue depressors. Your doctor comes in, listens as you describe what’s been bothering you. She nods, a wrinkle of concern crossing her forehead. She asks a few follow-up questions. Then she says, “I’m going to prescribe you something that isn’t designed…

Prescription drugs and vaccines revolutionized healthcare, dramatically decreasing death from disease and improving quality of life across the globe. But how do researchers, universities and hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry decide which diseases to pursue developing drugs for?In my work as director of the Health Outcomes, Policy, and Evidence Synthesis group at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, I assess the effectiveness and safety of different treatment options to help clinicians and patients…

Zepbound’s approval was based on trials run by Eli Lilly that included 2,539 adults with obesity or excess weight and weight-related medical problems other than diabetes, according to the company. In those studies, people taking Zepbound who also made diet and exercise changes experienced substantial weight loss at 72 weeks compared with those on a placebo. At the highest dose of 15 milligrams, people taking Zepbound lost an average of 48 pounds. At the lowest dose of 5 milligrams, people lost an average of 34. Those…

A sixth person, dubbed the “Geneva patient,” may be free of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant intended to treat another disease—his cancer. The man, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1990, continues to have no detectable virus in his blood 20 months after stopping medication to control the infection.So far, five people are considered to be cured of HIV after undergoing stem cell transplants for cancer. All five received stem cells from donors with a rare mutation in a gene called CCR5. Found in a small number of…

In the intensive care ward of Radboud University Medical Center, a sprawling hospital in the southeastern Netherlands, Paul Verweij was worried. The physician-scientist was accustomed to dealing with very sick patients; as chair of medical microbiology, his job was to identify dire pathogens so the right treatments could be prescribed.One group of patients had the kind of grave illnesses that are frequent in an ICU: blood cancers, immune disorders, end-stage lung disease. But layered on top of those, they all were…

Today, on average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug. The vision is to use AI to make drug discovery faster and cheaper. By predicting how potential drugs might behave in the body and discarding dead-end compounds before they leave the computer, machine-learning models can cut down on the need for painstaking lab work.  And there is always a need for new drugs, says Adityo Prakash, CEO of the California-based drug company Verseon: “There are still too many diseases we can’t treat…

The changing nature of the virus also makes it difficult to conduct human clinical trials and get a new antibody to patients in time for it to work against the current variants. At a meeting in December, drugmakers asked US and European regulators to consider adopting new standards for approving new antibody drugs, especially those meant for immunocompromised people. They suggested that new antibody drugs that are similar to previously authorized ones shouldn’t have to go through large clinical trials to test their…

Your gut has an obvious job: It processes the food you eat. But it has another important function: It protects you from the bacteria, viruses, or allergens you ingest along with that food. “The largest part of the immune system in humans is the GI tract, and our biggest exposure to the world is what we put in our mouth,” says Michael Helmrath, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who treats patients with intestinal diseases. Sometimes this system malfunctions or doesn’t develop properly,…

Next, they proved that the bots could swim. In test tubes containing urea, the microbots reached speeds of up to 4 micrometers per second—“one or two body lengths per second,” says Sánchez. (Humans also swim around one body-length per second.)Then it was time to show that the bots could also kill. But the team agonized over how to prove that they could actually treat an animal’s infection better than by just using passive drops of antibiotics. "That took some time," de la Fuente says.In the end, they devised a setup to…