drug development

‘Organs-on-chips’ wins design award

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Silicon chips that mimic the function of living human organs have won the Design of the Year award from the Design Museum in London.

It is the first time an entry from the field of medicine has won the award.

The museum said the project seems to “symbolise the essence of life and also happens to be beautiful to look at”.

Scientists at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute placed human cells from different tissues on to the chips to study how the different organs worked.

Their lung-on-a-chip, for example, contracts and relaxes, as the lungs would, as air is passed over the cells.

The Wyss Institute says the devices could provide an alternative to animal testing for drug development.

 

Full story at BBC News

How DNA sequencing is transforming the hunt for new drugs

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Drug manufacturers have begun amassing enormous troves of human DNA in hopes of significantly shortening the time it takes to identify new drug candidates, a move some say is transforming the development of medicines.

The efforts will help researchers identify rare genetic mutations by scanning large databases of volunteers who agree to have their DNA sequenced and to provide access to detailed medical records.

It is made possible by the dramatically lower cost of genetic sequencing — it took government-funded scientists $3 billion and 13 years to sequence the first human genome by 2003. As of last year, the cost was closer to $1,500 per genome, down from $20,000 five years ago.

 

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Drugs in dirt: Scientists appeal for help

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US scientists are asking the public to join them in their quest to mine the Earth’s soil for compounds that could be turned into vital new drugs.

Spurred on by the recent discovery of a potential new antibiotic in soil, the Rockefeller University team want to check dirt from every country in the world.

They have already begun analysing samples from beaches, forests and deserts across five continents.

But they need help getting samples.

Which is where we all come in.

Citizen science

On their Drugs From Dirt website, they say: “The world is a big place and we can’t get get to all of the various corners of it.

“We would like some assistance in sampling soil from around the world. If this sounds interesting to you – sign up.”

They want to hear from people from all countries and are particularly keen to receive samples from unique, unexplored environments such as caves, islands, and hot springs.

Such places, they say, could house the holy grail – compounds produced by soil bacteria that are entirely new to science.

Researcher Dr Sean Brady told the BBC: “We are not after hundreds of thousands of samples. What we really want is a couple of thousand from some really unique places that could contain some really interesting stuff. So it’s not really your garden soil we are after, although that will have plenty of bacteria in it too.”

 

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Catalyst-where-you-want-it method expands the possibilities for new drug development

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Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry have described a method for creating and modifying organic compounds that overcomes a major limitation of previous methods. The advance opens up a large number of novel chemical structures for synthesis and evaluation, for example, as candidate pharmaceuticals.

The new method was designed to avoid an unwanted side effect – a diversion of a catalyst molecule to the wrong location – that prevents chemists from manipulating many organic compounds in the class known as heterocycles, which are commonly used as drugs.

The newly described technique gets around this obstacle by generating a reactive catalyst at precisely the desired site on a molecule to be modified.

“We have already applied this technology to enable the modification of a wide range of chemical structures, including a complex drug candidate being developed by a major pharmaceutical company,” said Jin-Quan Yu, professor of chemistry at TSRI.

Yu and his colleagues describe the new method in a paper published by the journal Nature.

 

Full story at MNT

Novel approach mimicks natural evolution with ‘promiscuous reactions’ to improve the diversity of drugs

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A revolutionary new scientific method developed at the University of Leeds will improve the diversity of ‘biologically active molecules’, such as antibiotics and anti-cancer agents.

The researchers, who report their findings online in the journal Nature Chemistry, took their inspiration from evolution in nature. The research may uncover new pharmaceutical drugs that traditional methods would never have found.

“Nature produces some amazing structures with really interesting biological activity, but the plant or animal did not design them. Instead the organisms gradually evolved both the chemical structures and the methods to produce them over millennia because they were of benefit. We wanted to capture the essence of this in our approach to discovering new drugs,” said George Karageorgis, a PhD student from the School of Chemistry and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, and first author of the study.

The traditional method for discovering new drugs involves preparing new biologically active molecules by adjusting the chemical structure of an existing one slightly and analysing the results. This trial and error method is both time consuming and limits the variety of new types of drugs that are developed.

“There is a known problem with limited diversity in drug discovery. It’s like a baker always going to the same storage cupboard and using the same ingredients, yet hoping to create something that tastes different,” said Dr Stuart Warriner from the School of Chemistry and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, a co-author of the research paper.

Read full story at MNT