An experimental drug for a rare, inherited form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has shown promise in a phase 1/phase 2 clinical trial conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and other sites around the world and sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Biogen Inc. The trial indicated […]
Precision medicine guides choice of better drug therapy in severe heart disease
Is personalized medicine cost-effective? University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Nita Limdi, Pharm.D., Ph.D., and colleagues across the United States have answered that question for one medical treatment. Patients experiencing a heart attack—known as a myocardial infarction or an acute coronary syndrome—have sharply diminished blood flow in coronary arteries, with a high risk of heart […]
FDA allows emergency use of drug for coronavirus
U.S. regulators on Friday allowed emergency use of an experimental drug that appears to help some coronavirus patients recover faster. It is the first drug shown to help fight COVID-19, which has killed more than 230,000 people worldwide. President Donald Trump announced the news at the White House alongside Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen […]
Coronavirus update: New antiviral drug gaining traction which could help with COVID-19
The fast-evolving COVID-19 pandemic is posing unusual and often frustrating challenges in the search for new drugs and vaccines, forcing researchers to rework or sometimes even scrap clinical trials as the science becomes null in void and with current lockdowns still taking place in most parts of the world, study subjects are proving difficult to […]
Intestinal parasite delivers active agent against allergic Asthma
German scientists have isolated from the larvae of a parasite, an anti-inflammatory substance that may help asthmatics. The effectiveness could even be better than the cortisone-containing medication. The larvae of the parasite Heligmosomoides heligmosomoides bakeri can only develop in the intestinal mucosa of rodents. The larvae need to trick the immune system of the host, […]
New drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy could help improve and prolong lives
Academics at Royal Holloway have developed a new genetic medicine that has been given the go ahead by the U.S Food and Drug Association (FDA) to be prescribed globally to a subset of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare genetic disease that causes muscle weakness and wasting. Sufferers of DMD have a reduced […]
Novel drug targets tumor growth in advanced kidney cancer
Scientists report promising activity of a novel drug that targets a key molecular driver of clear cell renal cell carcinoma in patients with metastatic disease. Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report a response rate of 24 percent across all risk categories of patients given an oral first-in-class agent that targets hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) 2-a, […]
Men who took erectile-dysfunction drug had blue-tinted vision for days.
Many men take the erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, without problems. But in rare cases, they may experience an odd side effect: changes in eyesight, including blue-tinted vision, that last for several weeks, according to a new report. The report, published Friday (Feb. 7) in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, describes […]
Novel compound is promising drug candidate for Alzheimer’s disease
A newly identified compound is a promising candidate for inhibiting the production of amyloids, the abnormal proteins that form toxic clumps, called fibrils, inside the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. As published today in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemical Communications, the compound—known as “C1″—uses a novel mechanism to efficiently prevent the enzyme gamma-secretase […]
Human Body-on-Chip platform enables in vitro prediction of drug behaviors in humans
Drug development is an extremely arduous and costly process, and failure rates in clinical trials that test new drugs for their safety and efficacy in humans remain very high. According to current estimates, only 13.8% of all tested drugs demonstrate ultimate clinical success and obtain approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There are […]