Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) discovered a new way to make use of drugs' unwanted side effects. They developed a computational method that compares how similar the side effects of different drugs are and predicts how likely the drugs act on the same target molecule.

Epix Pharmaceuticals Inc is going to stop further development of its depression drug, which failed to show sufficient effectiveness in a recent mid-stage trial, sending its shares down 32 percent.

A new class of painkillers that block a receptor called TRPV1 may interfere with brain functions such as learning and memory, a new study suggests. The experiments with rat brain found that the TRPV1 receptor regulates a neural mechanism called long-term depression, which is believed to be central to establishing memory pathways in the brain.

There are to date no objective clinical laboratory blood tests for mood disorders. The current reliance on patient self-report of symptom severity and on the clinicians’ impression is a rate limiting step in effective treatment and new drug development.

Guidance from an innovative computational approach could speed up the process and cut down the cost of new drug development, researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center and Columbia University suggest in a study to be published in the February 2008 issue of Genome Research, available early online.

A new chemical synthesis method based on a catalyst worth many times the price of gold and providing a far more efficient and economical method than traditional ones for designing and manufacturing extremely novel pharmaceutical compounds is described by its University at Buffalo developers in a review article in the current issue of Nature.

Royal Holloway and CABI both bring a combination of individual scientific skills, expertise and resources to the project. When brought together, these offer the opportunity to build a highly focused natural products drug discovery operation that will address the urgent need for bringing new antibiotic compounds to market.

In a major breakthrough for future research and drug development, a team of Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) investigators developed a new, more reliable method for measuring protein synthesis and turnover, processes that are critical to understanding cellular functions.

New research, led by a Virginia Tech chemist, may someday help natural-products chemists decrease by years the amount of time it takes for the development of certain types of medicinal drugs.

A team of Brown University biomedical engineers has invented a 3-D Petri dish that can grow cells in three dimensions, a method that promises to quickly and cheaply produce more realistic cells for drug development and tissue transplantation.

Scientists have developed unique technology to grow stem cells and other tissue in the laboratory in conditions similar to the way they grow in the human body.

Scientists at Cure Lab, Inc., a biotechnology company based in Canton, Massachusetts, in collaboration with researchers at Boston University and Harvard Medical School have discovered a potential new target for the development of anti-influenza (flu) drugs, including those that may be effective against potentially pandemic influenza strains like H5N1.