Review Articles on Drug Discovery

Filed in archive Drugs, Vaccines and Therapeutics on September 27, 2005

Nature Reviews runs the following review articles which may be of interest to those in the Drug Discovery field:

Opportunities and Challenges in Antiparasitic Drug Discovery. The abstract reads:

New antiparasitic drugs are urgently needed to treat and control diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness and filariasis, which affect millions of people each year. However, because the majority of those infected live in countries in which the prospects of any financial return on investment are too low to support market-driven drug discovery and development, alternative approaches are needed. In this article, challenges and opportunities for antiparasitic drug discovery are considered, highlighting some of the progress that has been made in recent years, partly through scientific advances, but also by more effective partnership between the public and private sectors.

The Concept of Synthetic Lethality in the Context of Anticancer Therapy. The abstract reads:

Two genes are synthetic lethal if mutation of either alone is compatible with viability but mutation of both leads to death. So, targeting a gene that is synthetic lethal to a cancer-relevant mutation should kill only cancer cells and spare normal cells. Synthetic lethality therefore provides a conceptual framework for the development of cancer-specific cytotoxic agents. This paradigm has not been exploited in the past because there were no robust methods for systematically identifying synthetic lethal genes. This is changing as a result of the increased availability of chemical and genetic tools for perturbing gene function in somatic cells.

And Fresh From The Pipeline: Exenatide

In April 2005, exenatide (Byetta; Amylin/Eli Lilly) was approved by the US FDA as an adjunctive therapy to improve blood-sugar control in patients with type 2 diabetes. It is the first in a new class of drugs that mimic the activity of natural glucoregulatory peptides known as incretins.