Research Areas

An open letter to academic journal publishers and editors: Okay...we get it…biotin and streptavidin bind each other.

The most affordable or effective therapeutics are useless if clinicians can’t get the right drugs to the right people. For this to occur, effective disease diagnosis is critical. But therein lay the problem, because the developing world is faced with a variety of challenges that are rare or unknown elsewhere. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of NGOs and diagnostics companies to examine the reasons behind these challenges and possible solutions.

Most people have a soft spot for orphans. These unfortunate souls, often depicted with unusually large and needy eyes, tug at the heartstrings. Such has not always been the case in the pharmaceutical industry, where an orphan is a treatment for a rare disease that occurs in fewer than 200,000 people in the United States, as defined by the FDA’s Orphan Drug Act, passed in 1983.

Most people in the drug discovery community have become familiar with what has been called “the obligatory graph”—a comparison showing a continual increase in R&D investment by the pharmaceutical industry coupled with a disappointingly low production of approved new molecular entities (NMEs). In fact, in 2005, only 18 NMEs were approved by the FDA, the second lowest count in the past decade. Concomitant with this shortfall is a rising tide of patent expirations of existing blockbuster drugs. Likewise, there has been a steadily increasing proportion of prescriptions dispensed for generics relative to drugs with market exclusivity.

Advances in genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics over the last decade have provided an unprecedented, exquisitely detailed view into the molecular nature of disease and treatment. Biomarkers are among the most practical tools arising from the “omics” revolution.

Solexa Inc. announced a collaboration with Invitrogen on its Genome Analysis System that reduces the cost of resequencing human genomes to about $100,000.

Cognia Corp. announced in June the introduction of its Cognia Catabolism database, containing information about ubiquitin system molecules.

Cytopia Ltd. recently announced the signing of a global license and research and development collaboration with Novartis to develop orally active, small-molecule therapeutics targeting the JAK3 kinase for the prevention of transplant rejection and the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

To build an electronic infrastructure for translational medicine and technology, the Windber Research Institute (WRI) announced recently it entered into a strategic arrangement with the Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology (SCBIT).