With the discovery of suitable molecular targets – cellular molecules along pathways crucial for sustaining the life of cancer cells – comes the perplexing dilemma of where to find the next therapeutics that will bind to and disable those targets. While the possibilities for drug designs are near-limitless, the methods to screen drug databases and repositories are often problematic or ill-suited for the particular needs of researchers.
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For years, pharmaceutical companies have sought to restrict public access to drug safety data collected in clinical trials on the basis that it is proprietary information, arguing that competitors could use that information in the development of their own products. However, a number of recent cases of drugs found to have dangerous side effects after coming to market, such as the anti-inflammatory drug rofecoxib (Vioxx), have raised concerns about safety data being treated as confidential.
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