Many (if not most) clinical trials end up failing, but given the bias towards positive results sometimes the reasons for their not working remain unclear. Luckily, a team at Open Targets and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have analysed the reasons for aborted clinical trials mentioned in Clinicaltrials.gov, the open-source register for clinical trials worldwide […]
Author: Claire Hendershot, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Developing a new drug can take years of research and cost millions of dollars. Still, more than 90% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials, with even more that never make it to the clinical stage. Many drugs fail because they simply aren’t safe. Researchers at […]
Biology • Biomedicine • Medicine • Pharmacy
One of the biggest health threats in our current society is not related to a virus, not even to diabetes or cardiovascular disease, but to antimicrobial resistance. In fact, over 5 million deaths per year are associated with resistant bacteria, of which nearly 1.3 million deaths per year are directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance. This […]
Author: José R. Pineda got his Ph.D. from University of Barcelona in 2006. Since 2007 he has worked for Institut Curie and The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Currently he is a researcher of the UPV/EHU. He investigates the role of stem cells in physiologic and pathologic conditions. Replicative senescence is a process […]
Serotonin or 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) is a neurotransmitter involved in various cognitive and affective functions. Drugs targeting serotonin transmission, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are the first-line pharmacological treatments for many neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. These antidepressants increase the concentration in the synaptic space of this neurotransmitter […]
Clinical research has fundamentally discriminated women, assuming that they are nothing more than “small” men and therefore, drugs should work mostly the same if just adjusting the dose to their lower weight. However, this has been proven not to be the case. The physiology of the two sexes differs in several parameters, that is why […]
Occasionally I receive groups of messages from families with autistic members and I know the reason: they have read in the press exciting news about autism, a spectacular treatment, even a miracle cure. Unfortunately, if all that news were true we would have solved autism hundreds of times by now. So let’s start with the […]
Long disregarded as a party drug, loved by hippies and alternative thinkers, LSD has been recently demonstrated to be much more than that, being useful as an anti-depressive and in therapy against PTSD and other traumas. Now, another “power” of LSD has been uncovered: it potentiates brain plasticity, thereby improving memory and other cognitive processes […]
Antidepressants are the mainstay for treating depression, but their use is clouded by doubts about their short-, medium- and long-term efficacy. This is not to say that we should not use them, as these drugs save lives in many cases, but a recent review reinforces these questions as it sees little difference in the quality […]
Catalysis-based approaches for the activation of anticancer rely on the use of metal catalysts capable of deprotecting inactive precursors of organic drugs or transforming key biomolecules available in the cellular environment. Nevertheless, the efficiency of most of the schemes described so far is rather low, limiting the benefits of catalytic amplification as a strategy for […]