Drugs continue to fail. Most candidates that enter into the development process do not come out the other end as approved therapies. But the reasons for those failures have shifted.
In 2012, researchers reported that in mice, treatment with Eisai Inc.'s lymphoma drug Targretin (bexarotene) could reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. In a study published in Science, the authors reported that treating mice with the drug improved memories as well as social behaviors, and decreased levels of soluble A-beta.
Over the past few years, a shift has occurred in how researchers think of neurodevelopmental disorders. Such disorders were once considered immutable once the faulty wiring that was presumed to be at their heart was put in place during development.
Major depression affects more than 15 percent of the population at some point in their lives, and about 7 percent in any given year. Currently approved antidepressants are effective only about half the time – and even then, with a lag time of several weeks after a patient starts taking them.
Through the indirect targeting of toll-like receptors via their co-receptor, researchers have boosted the immune response to infection, and helped animals with experimentally induced sepsis fight off the bacteria that set off the septic response.
Last week, researchers from Oregon Health & Science University reported that they had created embryonic stem cells via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), with a high enough efficiency to bring the creation of patient-specific embryonic stem cell lines into the realm of the possible.
The ErbB family of receptor tyrosine kinases is well known to drug developers, though often under one of its aliases. ErbB1, better known as epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, is the target of drugs such as Tarceva (erlotinib, Roche AG and Astellas Pharma Inc.), Iressa (gefitinib, AstraZeneca plc.), Vectibix (panitumumab, Amgen Inc.) and Erbitux (cetuximab, Eli Lilly and Co.) Roche drugs Herceptin (trastuzumab), Perjeta (pertuzumab) and Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine) target ErbB2, which also goes by HER2/neu.
