Are Placebo’s Getting More Effective?

At least some people believe they are – particularly those drug companies whose pipeline champions are being sunk by the famous effect. This Wired article offers a great list of drugs recently entombed by the placebo effect. It also explains it’s history and the concern it is causing in drug development. But I disagree that [...]

Clinical Trials Evolving

A NYTimes article, Lack of Study Volunteers Is Said To Hobble Fight Against Cancer, gives some stark statistics about the diminishing availability of patients for cancer trials, and hints at some of the broader problems in the world of clinical trials. At a recent NHMRC Clinical Trials  meeting, several presentations dealt with the changing nature [...]

A Public Drug Library

From Fiercebioresearcher: The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has one of the largest public drug libraries in the world. And the stockpile of more than 3,000 drugs has proven a fertile field for researchers exploring new uses for old compounds. Exploring the stacks has revealed that itraconazole–used to treat toenail fungus–may be effective against [...]

Scientists Mine Drugs Database for New Diabetes Treatment

From: http://www.biocompare.com/News/NewsStory/263918/NewsStory.html Scientists have harnessed a new drug discovery tool to identify a new player in the body’s insulin secretion process. This finding could spark a completely new class of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes. In work published today (22 February) in Nature Chemical Biology researchers at the University of Oxford explain how they [...]

The Next Class of Blockbuster Drugs?

The power of antibodies is well established. but their cost is often prohibitive in a world of already stretched health budgets. The solution to this conundrum may have appeared. Mini or nano-antibodies from llama, camels, shark and other animals have been the subjected of much research for some years. These animals, including the camelid family, [...]