Results tagged “Drug development” from Drugs & Medicaments

Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill.

Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model "ethical pharmaceuticals".

Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medicine which is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company and can be made and sold cheaply.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Wednesday a safety analysis of its developing hepatitis C drug VX-950 showed 9 percent of the patients involved dropped out of the program because of adverse events including gastrointestinal disorders and rash.

The news sent shares of Vertex fell 62 cents to $38.78 in morning trading on the Nasdaq, following a drop in premarket trading.

The midstage study involved 250 patients, with the current interim data involving 74 patients for whom data was available at 12 weeks. Patients were given either the drug, called telaprevir, or placebo in combination with ribavirin. The safety study results showed that 9 percent discontinued treatment because of adverse events, with rash being the most common, compared with 3 percent of the patients taking placebo.

Those already in Washington, and those newly elected to Congress, who want to artificially control drug prices got an important lesson in economics last week. They also got a tutorial on why new lifesaving drugs are so expensive.

The lesson came as Pfizer, a leading pharmaceutical maker, canceled trials of a new cholesterol-controlling drug — torcetrapib.

As the stock market opened on Monday, Pfizer's announcement over the weekend sent its stock tumbling 14 percent, kicking the stuffing out of the company's estimated worth by more than $20 billion.

ATLANTA - One hundred years after the first diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) November 3, 1906, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, are focusing on neuroscience, immunology and vaccine research to better understand how AD develops and progresses as well as to advance the treatment and prevention of this progressive brain disorder. AD, which currently affects 20 million Americans, gradually destroys memory and the ability to learn, reason, make judgments and communicate.

"The Yerkes Research Center has developed four major areas of Alzheimer's research critical to identifying preventions and treatments to slow the progression or stop the onset of this devastating disease," said Stuart Zola, director of the center. "Along with investigating potential Alzheimer's disease vaccines, our researchers are developing a transgenic model for the disease, conducting comparative aging studies and detecting early symptoms of the disease."

Surprising? Not really. It looks like pharma companies are desperately looking for new markets. Now it's chronic fatigue syndrome. What's going to be next?  Being a loser syndrom? Having a bad day syndrom? Being a lazy ass person syndrom? I admirethe creativity of medical industry which leads to more and morenew "diseases" which are "hard to pin". Nevetherless, the drugs production won't be delayed. And there will be people who will be looking for a quick drug fix (instead of working on physical fitness). And there will be news articles and press releases which will advertise new remedies. From everything.

"Still, there is still no lab test, scan, or examination that can reveal chronic fatigue syndrome. It is diagnosed by a patient's history of illness, and after eliminating other conditions.

Also, there is no drug to cure it. Treatment focuses on bringing some relief from symptoms and the return of normal function."

Read more below 

A Mississauga company has introduced Canada's first dressing for chronic wounds, with a built-in painkiller.

Coloplast Canada is a subsidiary of a Danish company that spent seven years developing the treatment for chronic pain. The product was first introduced in Europe in March.

The dressing, "switches off the pain at the source," said George Baltazar, spokesperson for Coloplast Canada, which has its corporate head offices on Ridgeway Dr. in Erin Mills.

The new dressing, called Biatain-Ibu, delivers ibuprofen directly into the wound.

HealthDay News -- New insights into mechanisms controlling the formation of myelin -- the white matter that coats all nerves -- could help lead to treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS) and other myelin-related diseases and injury.

Myelin plays an important role in the overall health and function of the nervous system. MS and other diseases or injuries that damage myelin result in serious problems including uncoordinated movements, neuropathic pain and paralysis.

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montreal in Canada found that a protein called Par-3 plays an important role in the formation of myelin during nerve development.

Par-3 acts like a "molecular scaffold" to set up an "organizing center" that brings together proteins essential for the formation of myelin, the researchers said.

 

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- Medication for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, can now be delivered through a patch, researchers reported Friday.

The patch, called DAYTRANA, is meant for children 6 to 12. It gives physicians greater control over the amount of time a child is on medication, as it is easily administered and removed, said Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, a consultant to Shire, the company that produced the patch and funded the research.

The findings were presented recently at a child and adolescent psychiatrists' convention in San Diego.

"I like this because it gives you an off-switch," said Wilens, who is also in the clinical and research program in pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Pfizer said yesterday that clinical trials of torcetrapib — a heart medication that is the most important drug in the company’s pipeline — confirmed that it raises blood pressure, a potentially serious side effect.

Any problems with torcetrapib would be a serious setback for Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company. Pfizer has been counting on the new medicine to eventually replace the $13 billion in annual sales from the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, which loses patent protection in 2010.

Cardiologists and Wall Street analysts alike have been closely watching the clinical trials of torcetrapib, a medicine intended to raise so-called good cholesterol.

The urgent search for a medication to treat prion diseases has led scientists in Germany to synthesize a new group of compounds, including one that is 15 times more potent than an approved drug now being tested in clinical trials.

Their report is scheduled for the Nov. 2 issue of the biweekly ACS Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Prions are infectious proteins that cause brain disorders like Mad Cow Disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans. Peter Gmeiner and colleagues note that the recent emergence of a new form of CDJ, linked to consumption of infected beef mainly in Great Britain, intensified the search for anti-prion compounds.

New York, October 27, 2006 - There may be as many as 70 million Americans with prehypertension. If these people can be treated pharmacologically to avoid or delay progression to clinical hypertension, there would be significant benefits to them and the overall health of the population. The recent TROPHY study seems to lead to that conclusion. However, two editorials published in the November issue of the American Journal of Hypertension emphatically argue that the study is flawed and the conclusions reached are misleading.

Persons with prehypertension, generally defined as having a systolic blood pressure in the range of 120-139 mm Hg or a diastolic blood pressure of 80-89, will usually develop hypertension at the rate of about 10% per year. The recent Trial of Preventing Hypertension (TROPHY) examined whether treating patients with candesartan for two years resulted in a sustained reduction in the incidence of high blood pressure after the drug was discontinued. The TROPHY study concluded that the treatment significantly reduced the risk of incident hypertension over the four year study.

A Scottish scientist has won a major award for a treatment which could allow diabetics to inhale insulin.

Currently, Scotland's 200,000 diabetes patients need daily injections to regulate their blood sugar levels.

Dr Marie-Claire Parker, chief executive of Glasgow-based company XstalBio, has developed tiny particles containing insulin which can be inhaled.

LONDON (Reuters) - AstraZeneca Plc's experimental stroke drug NXY-059 failed to meet its goal in a pivotal Phase III clinical trial, dealing a fresh blow to the group's already depleted new product pipeline.

The medicine will now be dropped from development, the company said on Thursday, overshadowing what analysts expect to be a strong set of third-quarter results due at 1000 GMT and sending its shares down around 3.5 percent in early trade.

The so-called SAINT II study was designed to show a reduction in disability in patients following an acute ischemic stroke. In the event there was no statistically significant difference among patients given either NXY-059 or placebo.

Tanox Inc. has initiated a new clinical trial of TNX-650 as a potential treatment for moderate-to-severe asthma.

The Phase I trial involves 32 subjects and will study the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of single doses of TNX-650 in healthy volunteers.

Moderate-to-severe asthmatics comprise approximately 35 percent of the estimated 17 million asthma patients in the U.S.

Researchers at the Methodist Neurological Institute (NI) have demonstrated that the immune cells of the spinal cord and brain contribute significantly to prolonging survival in a model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that results in paralysis and eventual death, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.

By performing bone marrow transplants in mice that are born without immune systems, transplanted cells slowed the loss of motoneurons and increased life expectancy by 40 percent.

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Scientists at a California biotechnology company said they have developed a way to turn embryonic stem cells into insulin-producing pancreatic cells.

Scientists at Novocell in San Diego said years of research remain before a therapy can be developed from their study of using embryonic stem cells to replace cells destroyed by the body's immune system because of juvenile, or type 1, diabetes, the New York Times said Friday.

As much as I dislike press releases, I think this one is important.

We now have another new option that treats the disease in an entirely new way that can be added to existing treatment regimens to help patients gain more control over their blood sugar levels.

Make sure you check the side-effects, highlighted at the very bototm of the article.

Oct. 16, 2006 -- The "ketogenic diet" might be the springboard for a new type of epilepsy drug.

The ketogenic diet strictly limits carbohydrates and may help control seizuresseizures in some people.

That's nothing new. The ketogenic diet has been around since the 1920s (and shouldn't be tried without medical supervision).

The results of the latest diabetes-prevention trial, DREAM (Diabetes REduction Assessment with ramipril and rosiglitazone Medication), announced recently how the trial reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 62 percent relative to placebo among people at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The DREAM (Diabetes REduction Assessment with ramipril and rosiglitazone Medication) trial evaluated the likelihood of progression to type-2 diabetes over a three-year period among 5,269 people with a condition known as “pre-diabetes.”1 In pre-diabetes, blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not yet high enough for a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.

by Gary Haber, The News Hournal, 15 Oct 2006

Pharmaceutical makers are increasingly developing drugs that target specific groups of patients, and a Newark company is playing a leading role.

In recent years, drug companies have launched drugs to treat conditions like a form of leukemia in patients with a genetic condition called Philadelphia chromosome, and a treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer among women whose genetic makeup makes them less likely to benefit from other drugs.