Delivering medicines with microscopic flowers

Microparticles consisting of extremely thin petals can be used to transport medicines precisely via the bloodstream to tumors or blood clots

11-Dec-2024 - How can medicines be directed to the precise location within the body where they need to act? Scientists have been researching this question for a long time. An example would be delivering cancer drugs directly to a tumour so that they only take effect at this specific location, without causing ...

Predicting the mode of action of new anti-cancer drugs with AI

Acceleration of the development of new cancer drugs

22-Nov-2024 - Plants, fungi and bacteria produce a variety of active substances that alter cell metabolism, sometimes to the point of cell death. This makes them promising candidates for new drugs against cancer and other diseases. Although a diverse range of bioactives exists, the further development of new ...

Towards a better understanding of the human immune defense against RNA viruses

New findings in the fight against pandemics

08-Oct-2024 - An international research team led by Prof. Dr. Janosch Hennig from the University of Bayreuth has discovered how the TRIM25 protein contributes to defense against RNA viruses whose genetic material is contained as ribonucleic acid (RNA). The results provide a better understanding of the ...

Impressive results against autoimmune disease

Severe systemic lupus no longer detectable after cancer medication treatment

06-Sep-2024 - The team at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin is astounded by the huge improvement seen in a female patient with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) after being treated with the cancer medication teclistamab. Not long ago, the 23-year-old was wheelchair-bound due to the autoimmune ...

Finding unknown effects of existing drugs

Proteins as the key to precision medicine

05-Aug-2024 - Fewer side effects, improved chances of healing: the goal of precision medicine is to provide patients with the most individualized treatment possible. This requires a precise understanding of what is happening at the cellular level. For the first time, researchers at the Technical University of ...

Key to Improving Cancer Treatments Discovered

Discovery Paves the Way for the Development of Precise Inhibitors

07-Jun-2024 - Some cancer drugs cause severe side effects because they are not working accurately enough. A team at the University of Würzburg led by biochemist Caroline Kisker has now discovered why. The small protein ubiquitin is involved in almost every cellular process in our body: it orchestrates the ...

New AI platform designs tomorrow’s cancer drugs

“A few years ago, AI was a dirty word in the pharmaceutical industry, but now the trend is definitely the opposite...”

08-May-2024 - Scientists at UC San Diego have developed a machine learning algorithm to simulate the time-consuming chemistry involved in the earliest phases of drug discovery, which could significantly streamline the process and open doors for never-before-seen treatments. Identifying candidate drugs for ...

Bringing Multidrug-Resistant Pathogens to their Knees

Fluorous lipopetides act as highly effective antibiotics

09-Apr-2024 - Multidrug-resistant bacterial infections that cannot be treated by any known antibiotics pose a serious global threat. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a Chinese research team has now introduced a method for the development of novel antibiotics to fight resistant pathogens. The drugs are based ...

Click, click, boom—150 new molecules within days instead of months

A new study calls accelerated SuFEx click chemistry “a robust platform for drug discovery”

08-Apr-2024 - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) chemists have created a new collection of molecular compounds and begun testing them as potential leads in the search for new drugs. Among these molecules, they found several that show promise for development as antibiotics and cancer therapies. Sounds like a ...

Pregabalin and gabapentin in combination with other drugs - a potentially lethal cocktail

02-Apr-2024 - The addictive nature of pregabalin is well known. Due to its relaxing and euphoric effects, pregabalin (as well as gabapentin) is increasingly being abused as a drug. According to a current UK evaluation, the number of pregabalin and gabapentin-related deaths has increased and a corresponding ...