Clemson bioengineer uses nanoparticles to target drugs

Clemson bioengineer Frank Alexis is designing new ways to target drugs and reduce the chances for side effects.

Pharmaceutical commercials can cause the unsettling feeling that if the disease doesn't kill, the cure will, what with a drug's long list of side effects and warnings. Many therapeutic drugs administered by pill, cream, syringe, IV or liquid can be a hit or miss delivery system. Researchers report that only 1 of 100,000 molecules of an intravenous drug make it to the intended spot in the body.

"The big issues for making medicines more effective are getting drugs to where they are needed and keeping them from breaking down as they circulate through the body," said Alexis. "A way to improve targeting a drug and preventing it from being passed out of the body is putting it in envelopes — putting the drug inside something to protect it until it's at the right spot."

The envelopes Alexis uses are nanoparticles. Think of an M&M, with the nanoparticle being the hard outer candy shell and the chocolate being the medicine. The goal would be the same as for an M&M — to melt in the right place.

Nanotechnology operates on the molecular level. It involves engineering materials on such a small scale that the results can be seen only with electron and atomic force microscopes. Nano-engineers take advantage of natural forces — positive and negative electrical charges, attraction and repulsion, surface texture — to have materials self assemble.

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Drug companies seek a cure for their ailing research. With costs and regulation rising, a new way of developing blockbuster treatments is needed.

THERE was warm applause for Lord [James] Black last month when the veteran drug developer stepped up in front of an 800-strong audience of business leaders and VIPs in the City to collect an award. The Nobel prize winner was being honoured by Medical Futures, a healthcare interest group, for his contribution to medical research — he is responsible for developing beta blockers, among other significant breakthroughs.

However, Black wonders whether, if he had been in his professional prime in today’s environment, his various discoveries would have happened. He argues that a safety-first approach is hindering the development of the next generation of blockbuster drugs.

“The problem, in my recent experience of trawling new products round big pharma’s R&D divisions, is that they are only comfortable in well-recognised fields,” he said.

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Large Pharma Cos Shift Focus To Research, From Cost Cuts

Pharmaceutical executives, faced with generic competition and other challenges, have shifted their primary focus from cost-cutting campaigns to reinvigorating research efforts, a new survey suggests.

Some 66% of industry executives said reinvigorating research-and-development was their top strategic initiative, while 40% said "optimizing costs" was the top priority, according to the survey released Wednesday.

That's a shift from last year, when a survey by E&Y together with The Economist found that 92% of executives ranked cost reduction as their number one initiative. "Large pharmaceutical companies have been intensely focused on costs for the last two years and are moving beyond short-term reductions to longer- term strategic cost management," the new report said.

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Wyeth latest drugmaker to narrow focus of research

Like many of the top pharmaceutical companies, Wyeth is narrowing its research focus to far fewer diseases as it tries to produce more successful new drugs, particularly for conditions lacking good treatments.

Wyeth is even ending research in its signature areas in women's health - contraceptives and menopause treatments - and switching to other female health problems with an unmet need, such as ovarian cancer and lupus.

The Madison, N.J.-based company is scaling back from doing research in its current 14 therapeutic areas to just six, Dr. Evan Loh, a Wyeth vice president, said Wednesday. Instead of doing research on a total of 55 diseases, it now will work on 27.

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Grassley Vows to Pressure NIH Over Grants

The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee wants the National Institutes of Health to revoke grants to academic scientists who fail to report financial conflicts of interest to their institutions, the Iowa Senator tells The Chronicle of Higher Education.

His remarks come after targeting Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Cincinnati, because some academics underreported their own financial interests in research projects supported by the NIH. Institutions are required by federal regulation to report the existence of those conflicts to the agency. Grassley is seeking info from 20 other institutions about financial conflicts among their scientists, including Brown University’s Martin Keller, and the American Psychiatric Association.

Since 1995, an NIH regulation has required scientists to report to their universities any “significant financial interests” they hold in research projects financed by the agency. Those are defined as income or equity interest of $10,000 from a company or 5-percent ownership of its stock. The universities, in turn, are required to tell the NIH whether they were able to manage or eliminate the conflicts in order to avoid bias in the research findings, the paper notes.

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SCIENTISTS who develop drugs are familiar with disappointment — brilliant theories that don’t pan out or promising compounds derailed by unexpected side effects. They are accustomed to small steps and wrong turns, to failure after failure — until, in a moment, with hard work, brainpower and a lot of luck, all those little failures turn into one big success.

For Darryle D. Schoepp, that moment came one evening in October 2006, while he was seated at his desk in Indianapolis.

At the time, he was overseeing early-stage neuroscience research at Eli Lilly & Company and colleagues had just given him the results from a human trial of a new schizophrenia drug that worked differently than all other treatments. From the start, their work had been a long shot. Schizophrenia is notoriously difficult to treat, and Lilly’s drug — known only as LY2140023 — relied on a promising but unproved theory about how to combat the disorder.

When Dr. Schoepp saw the results, he leapt up in excitement. The drug had reduced schizophrenic symptoms, validating the efforts of hundreds of scientists, inside and outside of Lilly, who had labored together for almost two decades trying to unravel the disorder’s biological underpinnings.

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