Preclinical feature articles

41. Health Experts Weigh In On Zika Risks And Potential For Future Outbreaks 2/10/2016

    With the Zika virus spreading in the Americas, the outbreak and potential for future outbreaks in other areas of the world has many health professionals and organizations concerned. The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID), which promotes research, risk assessment, knowledge sharing, and best practices in the fight against infectious diseases, is one of those organizations.

42. What Went Wrong In France? 1/15/2016

    According to news reports, a drug undergoing testing in a French clinic has left one patient dead and four others critically ill, two that may have permanent brain damage. The drug has thus far been unnamed, but it appears to have been produced by the Portuguese company Bial. The French health minister has stated the drug acted on natural receptors found in the body known as endocannibinoids, which regulate mood and appetite.

43. Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Brings Value To Drug Development 1/12/2016

    Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) sits at the interface between pharmacometric modeling and simulation, and systems biology. It uses mathematics to describe biological processes. While pharmacokinetics describes what the body does to the drug, pharmacodynamics quantifies what the drug does to the body; the pharmacological response. QSP is a mechanistic modeling approach and an emerging technology, which mathematically integrates pharmacokinetics, pharmacological response and disease progress/modulation.

44. High Drug Prices: Should We Blame Pharma Or The FDA? 9/29/2015

    Last week, the Internet blew up over the greed of pharma companies and the cost of life-improving and life-saving medicines. This time the hatred was focused on Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, whose company purchased the generic drug Daraprim and immediately increased the price from $13.60 to $750 per pill. Patients were angry, and politicians were outraged. The uproar even caused one presidential candidate to immediately issue a plan to try and fix the problem. But is the anger being directed at pharma deserved or misplaced?

45. WIB Profile: CROs Must Have The Ability To Deliver 9/3/2015

    Zhaoqing (Ching) Ding has been involved with the sciences for more than 15 years. She earned a B.S. in Microbiology and a M.S. in Immunology, both from the University of California, San Diego. She then earned a Ph.D. in Immunology from the Stanford University School of Medicine before rounding out her education by attending the program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She started her career performing research in academia before joining The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson as a scientist in 2013. In this WIB profile article she shares her experience in working in academia versus pharma, the challenges of working with CROs, and the future potential of biotherapeutics.

46. Why Do Most Clinical Trials Fail? 7/8/2015

    According to the latest industry research, about 90 percent of drugs that reach clinical stage development never make it to FDA approval and commercialization. At first glance, one could conclude that the reason is the stringent FDA review process designed to ensure that only products that deliver an acceptable efficacy and safety profile ever reach consumers. But a more detailed analysis of the results of many clinical research programs tells a different story.

47. Understanding Key Early Phase Clinical Trial Cost Drivers 5/19/2015

    Pharmaceutical companies have been implementing intensive cost–saving efforts in the recent years through mergers, reducing overheads, and trimming down of entire business units for efficiency. These efforts have increased the need to outsource services to external vendors throughout the R&D value chain. The early phase clinical trial market in 2014 saw an approximate outsourcing rate of 56 percent with most of the patient studies being externalized to both global and specialist CROs. As cost efficiency is the main focus for pharma, it is important to understand the cost behavior of outsourcing services.

48. Signal Management In Drug And Biosimilars Development 5/7/2015

    Signal management in drug development has been ongoing, evolving, and improving for many years. For the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulatory bodies immunogenicity is a major area of safety concern for biosimilars as well as for peptide, protein, and drug therapeutics, all of which have the potential to trigger some level of antibody response.

49. ACRES: Ready To Improve The Conduct And Quality Of Clinical Trials 2/18/2015

    The nonprofit ACRES operates in the public interest, taking a multi-stakeholder approach, forming a true alliance united behind the goal of collaboratively building a system for the clinical research process, based in principles of Accountable Research™.

50. Improve Clinical Sites By Bringing Together Pharma, Biomedical R&D and CROs 2/18/2015

    How do you take pharma, and other biomedical R&D, as well as CROS, which for years have operated as separate entities, and get them to come together and create standards and an accreditation process to benefit the entire industry, indeed, the entire enterprise of a complex of multiple stakeholders, including regulators and the public?