The year's new drugs & biologics - 2009

Lab on chip for testing of repurposed drugs

The lab-on-chip technique broadly comprises of microfluidics and aims to progress multidimensionally by changing the outlook of medicine and pharmaceuticals as it finds it roots in miniaturization. Moreover, microfluidics facilitates precise physiological simulation and possesses biological system-mimicking capabilities for drug development and repurposing. Thus, organs on chip could pave a revolutionary pathway in the field of drug development and repurposing by reducing animal testing and improving drug repurposing.

Computational drug repurposing for viral infectious diseases: a case study on monkeypox

The traditional method of drug reuse or repurposing has significantly contributed to the identification of new antiviral compounds and therapeutic targets, enabling rapid response to developing infectious illnesses. This article presents an overview of how modern computational methods are used in drug repurposing for the treatment of viral infectious diseases. These methods utilize data sets that include reviewed information on the host's response to pathogens and drugs, as well as various connections such as gene expression patterns and protein-protein interaction networks. We assess the potential benefits and limitations of these methods by examining monkeypox as a specific example, but the knowledge acquired can be applied to other comparable disease scenarios.

Repurposing medications for treatment of age-related macular degeneration: Insights from novel approaches to data mining

The economic and visual burdens associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are expected to significantly increase in the coming years. As of now, interventions to delay or prevent AMD are limited. Hence, there is an urgent and unmet need to expand our therapeutic tools for AMD in a manner, that is, both efficient and cost-effective. In this review, we consider the idea of drug repurposing, in which existing medications with other indications can be re-imagined for treating AMD. We detail the results of several population-level studies that have shown associations between several candidates and decreased risk of AMD development or progression. Such candidates include the more extensively studied metformin and statins, in addition to recently identified candidates fluoxetine and l-DOPA (levodopa) that show promise. We then briefly explore results from an advanced bioinformatics study, which provides further evidence that existing medications are associated with AMD risk genes. Many of these candidates warrant further study in prospective, clinical trials, where their potential causal relationships with AMD can be thoroughly assessed.

A weighted non-negative matrix factorization approach to predict potential associations between drug and disease

BACKGROUND

Associations of drugs with diseases provide important information for expediting drug development. Due to the number of known drug-disease associations is still insufficient, and considering that inferring associations between them through traditional in vitro experiments is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, more accurate and reliable computational methods urgent need to be developed to predict potential associations of drugs with diseases.

METHODS

In this study, we present the model called weighted graph regularized collaborative non-negative matrix factorization for drug-disease association prediction (WNMFDDA). More specifically, we first calculated the drug similarity and disease similarity based on the chemical structures of drugs and medical description information of diseases, respectively. Then, to extend the model to work for new drugs and diseases, weighted [Formula: see text] nearest neighbor was used as a preprocessing step to reconstruct the interaction score profiles of drugs with diseases. Finally, a graph regularized non-negative matrix factorization model was used to identify potential associations between drug and disease.

RESULTS

During the cross-validation process, WNMFDDA achieved the AUC values of 0.939 and 0.952 on Fdataset and Cdataset under ten-fold cross validation, respectively, which outperforms other competing prediction methods. Moreover, case studies for several drugs and diseases were carried out to further verify the predictive performance of WNMFDDA. As a result, 13(Doxorubicin), 13(Amiodarone), 12(Obesity) and 12(Asthma) of the top 15 corresponding candidate diseases or drugs were confirmed by existing databases.

CONCLUSIONS

The experimental results adequately demonstrated that WNMFDDA is a very effective method for drug-disease association prediction. We believe that WNMFDDA is helpful for relevant biomedical researchers in follow-up studies.

Drug repurposing: a systematic review on root causes, barriers and facilitators

BACKGROUND

Repurposing is a drug development strategy receiving heightened attention after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization of several repurposed drugs to treat Covid-19. There remain knowledge gaps on the root causes, facilitators and barriers for repurposing.

METHOD

This systematic review used controlled vocabulary and free text terms to search ABI/Informa, Academic Search Premier, Business Source Complete, Cochrane Library, EconLit, Google Scholar, Ovid Embase, Ovid Medline, Pubmed, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection databases for the characteristics, reasons and example of companies deprioritizing development of promising drugs and barriers, facilitators and examples of successful re-purposing.

RESULTS

We identified 11,814 articles, screened 5,976 for relevance, found 437 eligible for full text review, 115 of which were included in full analysis. Most articles (66%, 76/115) discussed why promising drugs are abandoned, with lack of efficacy or superiority to other therapies (n = 59), strategic business reasons (n = 35), safety problems (n = 28), research design decisions (n = 12), the complex nature of a studied disease or drug (n = 7) and regulatory bodies requiring more information (n = 2) among top reasons. Key barriers to repurposing include inadequate resources (n = 42), trial data access and transparency around abandoned compounds (n = 20) and expertise (n = 11). Additional barriers include uncertainty about the value of repurposing (n = 13), liability risks (n = 5) and intellectual property (IP) challenges (n = 26). Facilitators include the ability to form multi-partner collaborations (n = 38), access to compound databases and database screening tools (n = 32), regulatory modifications (n = 5) and tax incentives (n = 2).

CONCLUSION

Promising drugs are commonly shelved due to insufficient efficacy or superiority to alternate therapies, poor market prospects, and industry consolidation. Inadequate resources and data access and challenges negotiating IP are key barriers to repurposing reaching its full potential as a core approach in drug development. Multi-partner collaborations and the availability and use of compound databases and tax incentives are key facilitators for repurposing. More research is needed on the current value of repurposing in drug development and how to better facilitate resources to support it, where valuable, especially financial, staffing for out-licensing shelved products, and legal expertise to negotiate IP agreements in multi-partner collaborations.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

The protocol was registered on Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/f634k/ ) as it was not eligible for registration on PROSPERO as the review did not focus on a health-related outcome.

Medicinal Plants with Abortifacient or Emmenagogue Activity: A Narrative Review Based on Traditional Persian Medicine

Introduction: Traditional Persian medicine (TPM) has a rich background and has introduced various plants with abortive or emmenagogue activity since ancient times. However, many of them are unknown in modern medicine, and a few trials have been conducted describing their efficacy and safety. These plants may be helpful for the management of incomplete abortion, with potentially lower side effects than chemical agents. Objectives: This review introduced these plants and their potential efficiency to link traditional and modern medicine and suggested further studies. Methods: The search strategy for citations in this narrative review was performed in two steps. At first, medicinal plants used as abortifacient or emmenagogue to manage incomplete abortions or retained products of conception were searched and extracted in the most famous TPM literature, including Al-Qanun Fi at-Tibb, Tuhfat-al-Momenin, and Makhzan-ul-advia. The next step was searching electronic databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar with the same keywords and herbal plants between 1970 and 2021. The overlapped plants between the manual and electronic search were found and briefly described. Results: In TPM literature, 88 plants with abortifacient activity were found, of which 47 were used to manage incomplete abortions or retained products of conception. Also, in the electronic database search, 14 plants were found to have abortifacient or emmenagogue activity. Among them, six plants, including Sesamum indicum L. (Sesame), Commiphora myrrha (myrrh), Lawsonia inermis L. (Henna), Opopanax chironium L. (Jooshir), Plumbago rosea (Shitraj or Stumbag), and Juniperus sabina (Abhal), overlapped with the manual search results. The abortifacient or emmenagogue activity and properties of all these 14 plants were described. Conclusions: The properties of many traditional plants with abortifacient activity are unknown in modern medicine; however, they should not be used in pregnant women. Nonetheless, they may have the power to be entered into modern medicine. Identifying their pharmacology and action mechanisms may be helpful to introduce them as a potential alternative to chemical agents in the management of induced or incomplete abortion with possibly lower side effects.

Repurposing FDA approved drugs as radiosensitizers for treating hypoxic prostate cancer

Background

The presence of hypoxia is a poor prognostic factor in prostate cancer and the hypoxic tumor microenvironment promotes radioresistance. There is potential for drug radiotherapy combinations to improve the therapeutic ratio. We aimed to investigate whether hypoxia-associated genes could be used to identify FDA approved drugs for repurposing for the treatment of hypoxic prostate cancer.

Methods

Hypoxia associated genes were identified and used in the connectivity mapping software QUADrATIC to identify FDA approved drugs as candidates for repurposing. Drugs identified were tested in vitro in prostate cancer cell lines (DU145, PC3, LNCAP). Cytotoxicity was investigated using the sulforhodamine B assay and radiosensitization using a clonogenic assay in normoxia and hypoxia.

Results

Menadione and gemcitabine had similar cytotoxicity in normoxia and hypoxia in all three cell lines. In DU145 cells, the radiation sensitizer enhancement ratio (SER) of menadione was 1.02 in normoxia and 1.15 in hypoxia. The SER of gemcitabine was 1.27 in normoxia and 1.09 in hypoxia. No radiosensitization was seen in PC3 cells.

Conclusion

Connectivity mapping can identify FDA approved drugs for potential repurposing that are linked to a radiobiologically relevant phenotype. Gemcitabine and menadione could be further investigated as potential radiosensitizers in prostate cancer.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12894-021-00856-x.

A high-content drug screening strategy to identify protein level modulators for genetic diseases: A proof-of-principle in autosomal dominant leukodystrophy

In genetic diseases, the most prevalent mechanism of pathogenicity is an altered expression of dosage-sensitive genes. Drugs that restore physiological levels of these genes should be effective in treating the associated conditions. We developed a screening strategy, based on a bicistronic dual-reporter vector, for identifying compounds that modulate protein levels, and used it in a pharmacological screening approach. To provide a proof-of-principle, we chose autosomal dominant leukodystrophy (ADLD), an ultra-rare adult-onset neurodegenerative disorder caused by lamin B1 (LMNB1) overexpression. We used a stable Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line that simultaneously expresses an AcGFP reporter fused to LMNB1 and a Ds-Red normalizer. Using high-content imaging analysis, we screened a library of 717 biologically active compounds and approved drugs, and identified alvespimycin, an HSP90 inhibitor, as a positive hit. We confirmed that alvespimycin can reduce LMNB1 levels by 30%-80% in five different cell lines (fibroblasts, NIH3T3, CHO, COS-7, and rat primary glial cells). In ADLD fibroblasts, alvespimycin reduced cytoplasmic LMNB1 by about 50%. We propose this approach for effectively identifying potential drugs for treating genetic diseases associated with deletions/duplications and paving the way toward Phase II clinical trials.

Manganese-Catalyzed anti-Selective Asymmetric Hydrogenation of α-Substituted β-Ketoamides

A Mn-catalyzed diastereo- and enantioselective hydrogenation of α-substituted β-ketoamides has been realized for the first time under dynamic kinetic resolution conditions. anti-α-Substituted β-hydroxy amides, which are useful building blocks for the synthesis of bioactive molecules and chiral drugs, were prepared in high yields with excellent selectivity (up to >99 % dr and >99 % ee) and unprecedentedly high activity (TON up to 10000). The origin of the excellent stereoselectivity was clarified by DFT calculations.

Natural Products as Sources of New Drugs over the Nearly Four Decades from 01/1981 to 09/2019

This review is an updated and expanded version of the five prior reviews that were published in this journal in 1997, 2003, 2007, 2012, and 2016. For all approved therapeutic agents, the time frame has been extended to cover the almost 39 years from the first of January 1981 to the 30th of September 2019 for all diseases worldwide and from ∼1946 (earliest so far identified) to the 30th of September 2019 for all approved antitumor drugs worldwide. As in earlier reviews, only the first approval of any drug is counted, irrespective of how many "biosimilars" or added approvals were subsequently identified. As in the 2012 and 2016 reviews, we have continued to utilize our secondary subdivision of a "natural product mimic", or "NM", to join the original primary divisions, and the designation "natural product botanical", or "NB", to cover those botanical "defined mixtures" now recognized as drug entities by the FDA (and similar organizations). From the data presented in this review, the utilization of natural products and/or synthetic variations using their novel structures, in order to discover and develop the final drug entity, is still alive and well. For example, in the area of cancer, over the time frame from 1946 to 1980, of the 75 small molecules, 40, or 53.3%, are N or ND. In the 1981 to date time frame the equivalent figures for the N* compounds of the 185 small molecules are 62, or 33.5%, though to these can be added the 58 S* and S*/NMs, bringing the figure to 64.9%. In other areas, the influence of natural product structures is quite marked with, as expected from prior information, the anti-infective area being dependent on natural products and their structures, though as can be seen in the review there are still disease areas (shown in Table 2) for which there are no drugs derived from natural products. Although combinatorial chemistry techniques have succeeded as methods of optimizing structures and have been used very successfully in the optimization of many recently approved agents, we are still able to identify only two de novo combinatorial compounds (one of which is a little speculative) approved as drugs in this 39-year time frame, though there is also one drug that was developed using the "fragment-binding methodology" and approved in 2012. We have also added a discussion of candidate drug entities currently in clinical trials as "warheads" and some very interesting preliminary reports on sources of novel antibiotics from Nature due to the absolute requirement for new agents to combat plasmid-borne resistance genes now in the general populace. We continue to draw the attention of readers to the recognition that a significant number of natural product drugs/leads are actually produced by microbes and/or microbial interactions with the "host from whence it was isolated"; thus we consider that this area of natural product research should be expanded significantly.

Native and synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy for determination of avanafil in presence of its co-formulated drug (dapoxetine hydrochloride): Application to pharmaceutical product, biological fluid and content uniformity

The native and synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy procedures have been established and validated for the simultaneous determination of a binary mixture of dapoxetine hydrochloride (DAP) and avanafil (AVA). The first procedure is based on measurement of native fluorescence intensity of both drugs at λ_Em 337 nm and 370 nm using λ_Ex 290 nm and 314 nm for DAP and AVA in methanol respectively. The second procedure describes a measurement of synchronous fluorescence intensity of these drugs at 232 nm for DAP, and 267 nm for AVA, using Δλ of 90nm. In the first procedure the fluorescence concentration were 0.1-4.0 μg/mL for DAP and 0.5-16 μg/mL for AVA. For the second procedure fluorescence concentrations were 0.025-1.0 μg/mL and 0.5-16 μg/mL for DAP and AVA respectively, with lower detection limit and quantification limits. The processes were successfully used for the limitation of DAP and AVA in their drug product without pre-separation. Then, the techniques were utilized for the determination of DAP and AVA in biological fluids. There is a good agreement between these results and the results obtained using a reference method.

Repurposing Butenafine as An Oral Nanomedicine for Visceral Leishmaniasis

Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease affecting more than 12 million people worldwide, which in its visceral clinical form (VL) is characterised by the accumulation of parasites in the liver and spleen, and can lead to death if not treated. Available treatments are not well tolerated due to severe adverse effects, need for parenteral administration and patient hospitalisation, and long duration of expensive treatments. These treatment realities justify the search for new effective drugs, repurposing existing licensed drugs towards safer and non-invasive cost-effective medicines for VL. In this work, we provide proof of concept studies of butenafine and butenafine self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems (B-SNEDDS) against Leishmania infantum. Liquid B-SNEDDS were optimised using design of experiments, and then were spray-dried onto porous colloidal silica carriers to produce solid-B-SNEDDS with enhanced flow properties and drug stability. Optimal liquid B-SNEDDS consisted of Butenafine:Capryol 90:Peceol:Labrasol (3:49.5:24.2:23.3 w/w), which were then sprayed-dried with Aerosil 200 with a final 1:2 (Aerosil:liquid B-SNEDDS w/w) ratio. Spray-dried particles exhibited near-maximal drug loading, while maintaining excellent powder flow properties (angle of repose <10°) and sustained release in acidic gastrointestinal media. Solid-B-SNEDDS demonstrated greater selectivity index against promastigotes and L. infantum-infected amastigotes than butenafine alone. Developed oral solid nanomedicines enable the non-invasive and safe administration of butenafine as a cost-effective and readily scalable repurposed medicine for VL.

Natural Products as Sources of New Drugs from 1981 to 2014

This contribution is a completely updated and expanded version of the four prior analogous reviews that were published in this journal in 1997, 2003, 2007, and 2012. In the case of all approved therapeutic agents, the time frame has been extended to cover the 34 years from January 1, 1981, to December 31, 2014, for all diseases worldwide, and from 1950 (earliest so far identified) to December 2014 for all approved antitumor drugs worldwide. As mentioned in the 2012 review, we have continued to utilize our secondary subdivision of a "natural product mimic", or "NM", to join the original primary divisions and the designation "natural product botanical", or "NB", to cover those botanical "defined mixtures" now recognized as drug entities by the U.S. FDA (and similar organizations). From the data presented in this review, the utilization of natural products and/or their novel structures, in order to discover and develop the final drug entity, is still alive and well. For example, in the area of cancer, over the time frame from around the 1940s to the end of 2014, of the 175 small molecules approved, 131, or 75%, are other than "S" (synthetic), with 85, or 49%, actually being either natural products or directly derived therefrom. In other areas, the influence of natural product structures is quite marked, with, as expected from prior information, the anti-infective area being dependent on natural products and their structures. We wish to draw the attention of readers to the rapidly evolving recognition that a significant number of natural product drugs/leads are actually produced by microbes and/or microbial interactions with the "host from whence it was isolated", and therefore it is considered that this area of natural product research should be expanded significantly.

DrugNet: network-based drug-disease prioritization by integrating heterogeneous data

OBJECTIVE

Computational drug repositioning can lead to a considerable reduction in cost and time in any drug development process. Recent approaches have addressed the network-based nature of biological information for performing complex prioritization tasks. In this work, we propose a new methodology based on heterogeneous network prioritization that can aid researchers in the drug repositioning process.

METHODS

We have developed DrugNet, a new methodology for drug-disease and disease-drug prioritization. Our approach is based on a network-based prioritization method called ProphNet which has recently been developed by the authors. ProphNet is able to integrate data from complex networks involving a wide range of types of elements and interactions. In this work, we built a network of interconnected drugs, proteins and diseases and applied DrugNet to different types of tests for drug repositioning.

RESULTS

We tested the performance of our approach on different validation tests, including cross validation and tests based on real clinical trials. DrugNet achieved a mean AUC value of 0.9552±0.0015 in 5-fold cross validation tests, and a mean AUC value of 0.8364 for tests based on recent clinical trials (phases 0-4) not present in our data. These results suggest that DrugNet could be very useful for discovering new drug uses. We also studied specific cases of particular interest, proving the benefits of heterogeneous data integration in this problem.

CONCLUSIONS

Our methodology suggests that new drugs can be repositioned by generating ranked lists of drugs based on a given disease query or vice versa. Our study shows that the simultaneous integration of information about diseases, drugs and targets can lead to a significant improvement in drug repositioning tasks. DrugNet is available as a web tool from http://genome2.ugr.es/drugnet/ (accessed 23.09.14). Matlab source code is also available on the website.

Natural product and natural product derived drugs in clinical trials

The 25 Natural Product (NP)-derived drugs launched since 2008 and the 100 NP-derived compounds and 33 Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs) in clinical trials or in registration at the end of 2013 are reviewed.

Network-based analysis of vaccine-related associations reveals consistent knowledge with the vaccine ontology

BACKGROUND

Ontologies are useful in many branches of biomedical research. For instance, in the vaccine domain, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been widely used to promote vaccine data standardization, integration, and computer-assisted reasoning. However, a major challenge in the VO has been to construct ontologies of vaccine functions, given incomplete vaccine knowledge and inconsistencies in how this knowledge is manually curated.

RESULTS

In this study, we show that network-based analysis of vaccine-related networks can identify underlying structural information consistent with that captured by the VO, and commonalities in the vaccine adverse events for vaccines and for diseases to produce new hypotheses about pathomechanisms involving the vaccine and the disease status. First, a vaccine-vaccine network was inferred by applying a bipartite network projection strategy to the vaccine-disease network extracted from the Semantic MEDLINE database. In total, 76 vaccines and 573 relationships were identified to construct the vaccine network. The shortest paths between all pairs of vaccines were calculated within the vaccine network. The correlation between the shortest paths of vaccine pairs and their semantic similarities in the VO was then investigated. Second, a vaccine-gene network was also constructed. In this network, 4 genes were identified as hubs interacting with at least 3 vaccines, and 4 vaccines were identified as hubs associated with at least 3 genes. These findings correlate with existing knowledge and provide new hypotheses in the fundamental interaction mechanisms involving vaccines, diseases, and genes.

CONCLUSIONS

In this study, we demonstrated that a combinatorial analysis using a literature knowledgebase, semantic technology, and ontology is able to reveal important unidentified knowledge critical to biomedical research and public health and to generate testable hypotheses for future experimental verification. As the associations from Semantic MEDLINE remain incomplete, we expect to extend this work by (1) integrating additional association databases to complement Semantic MEDLINE knowledge, (2) extending the neighbor genes of vaccine-associated genes, and (3) assigning confidence weights to different types of associations or associations from different sources.

Drug repurposing: mining protozoan proteomes for targets of known bioactive compounds

OBJECTIVE

To identify potential opportunities for drug repurposing by developing an automated approach to pre-screen the predicted proteomes of any organism against databases of known drug targets using only freely available resources.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We employed a combination of Ruby scripts that leverage data from the DrugBank and ChEMBL databases, MySQL, and BLAST to predict potential drugs and their targets from 13 published genomes. Results from a previous cell-based screen to identify inhibitors of Cryptosporidium parvum growth were used to validate our in-silico prediction method.

RESULTS

In-vitro validation of these results, using a cell-based C parvum growth assay, showed that the predicted inhibitors were significantly more likely than expected by chance to have confirmed activity, with 8.9-15.6% of predicted inhibitors confirmed depending on the drug target database used. This method was then used to predict inhibitors for the following 13 disease-causing protozoan parasites, including: C parvum, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia intestinalis, Leishmania braziliensis, Leishmania donovani, Leishmania major, Naegleria gruberi (in proxy of Naegleria fowleri), Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Toxoplasma gondii, Trichomonas vaginalis, Trypanosoma brucei and Trypanosoma cruzi.

CONCLUSIONS

Although proteome-wide screens for drug targets have disadvantages, in-silico methods can be developed that are fast, broad, inexpensive, and effective. In-vitro validation of our results for C parvum indicate that the method presented here can be used to construct a library for more directed small molecule screening, or pipelined into structural modeling and docking programs to facilitate target-based drug development.

In silico drug repositioning: what we need to know

Drug repositioning, exemplified by sildenafil and thalidomide, is a promising way to explore alternative indications for existing drugs. Recent research has shown that bioinformatics-based approaches have the potential to offer systematic insights into the complex relationships among drugs, targets and diseases necessary for successful repositioning. In this article, we propose the key bioinformatics steps essential for discovering valuable repositioning methods. The proposed steps (repurposing with a purpose, repurposing with a strategy and repurposing with confidence) are aimed at providing a repurposing pipeline, with particular focus on the proposed Drugs of New Indications (DNI) database, which can be used alongside currently available resources to improve in silico drug repositioning.

Natural products as sources of new drugs over the 30 years from 1981 to 2010

This review is an updated and expanded version of the three prior reviews that were published in this journal in 1997, 2003, and 2007. In the case of all approved therapeutic agents, the time frame has been extended to cover the 30 years from January 1, 1981, to December 31, 2010, for all diseases worldwide, and from 1950 (earliest so far identified) to December 2010 for all approved antitumor drugs worldwide. We have continued to utilize our secondary subdivision of a "natural product mimic" or "NM" to join the original primary divisions and have added a new designation, "natural product botanical" or "NB", to cover those botanical "defined mixtures" that have now been recognized as drug entities by the FDA and similar organizations. From the data presented, the utility of natural products as sources of novel structures, but not necessarily the final drug entity, is still alive and well. Thus, in the area of cancer, over the time frame from around the 1940s to date, of the 175 small molecules, 131, or 74.8%, are other than "S" (synthetic), with 85, or 48.6%, actually being either natural products or directly derived therefrom. In other areas, the influence of natural product structures is quite marked, with, as expected from prior information, the anti-infective area being dependent on natural products and their structures. Although combinatorial chemistry techniques have succeeded as methods of optimizing structures and have been used very successfully in the optimization of many recently approved agents, we are able to identify only one de novo combinatorial compound approved as a drug in this 30-year time frame. We wish to draw the attention of readers to the rapidly evolving recognition that a significant number of natural product drugs/leads are actually produced by microbes and/or microbial interactions with the "host from whence it was isolated", and therefore we consider that this area of natural product research should be expanded significantly.

Impact of high-throughput screening in biomedical research

High-throughput screening (HTS) has been postulated in several quarters to be a contributory factor to the decline in productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, it has been blamed for stifling the creativity that drug discovery demands. In this article, we aim to dispel these myths and present the case for the use of HTS as part of a proven scientific tool kit, the wider use of which is essential for the discovery of new chemotypes.

Drug repositioning for orphan diseases

The need and opportunity to discover therapeutics for rare or orphan diseases are enormous. Due to limited prevalence and/or commercial potential, of the approximately 6000 orphan diseases (defined by the FDA Orphan Drug Act as <200 000 US prevalence), only a small fraction (5%) is of interest to the biopharmaceutical industry. The fact that drug development is complicated, time-consuming and expensive with extremely low success rates only adds to the low rate of therapeutics available for orphan diseases. An alternative and efficient strategy to boost the discovery of orphan disease therapeutics is to find connections between an existing drug product and orphan disease. Drug Repositioning or Drug Repurposing--finding a new indication for a drug--is one way to maximize the potential of a drug. The advantages of this approach are manifold, but rational drug repositioning for orphan diseases is not trivial and poses several formidable challenges--pharmacologically and computationally. Most of the repositioned drugs currently in the market are the result of serendipity. One reason the connection between drug candidates and their potential new applications are not identified in an earlier or more systematic fashion is that the underlying mechanism 'connecting' them is either very intricate and unknown or indirect or dispersed and buried in an ever-increasing sea of information, much of which is emerging only recently and therefore is not well organized. In this study, we will review some of these issues and the current methodologies adopted or proposed to overcome them and translate chemical and biological discoveries into safe and effective orphan disease therapeutics.

Regulating interface science healthcare products: myths and uncertainties

Whenever new technology emerges it brings with it concerns and uncertainties about whether or how it will need to be regulated, particularly when it is applied to human healthcare. Drawing on the recent history in the European Union (EU) of the regulation of cell-based medicinal products, and in particular tissue-engineered products, this paper explores the myths that persist around their regulation and speculates on whether the existing regulatory landscape in the EU is flexible enough to incorporate nanotechnology and other new technologies into healthcare products. By untangling these myths a number of clear conclusions are revealed that, when considered in the context of risk-benefit, make it clear that what hinders the uptake of new technology is not regulatory process but basic science.