Posts Tagged ‘pharmaceuticals’
World’s Largest Video Protein Database Promises Rapid Drug Development
Developed through intensive supercomputer calculations at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine tapped into the international Protein Data Bank (PDB) to create the new video database. Each of the 1,700 proteins catalogued there is displayed through a series of 10,000 to 100,000 photos, showing how the higher order structures of complex proteins move and change. And while 1,700 proteins out of 40,000 may not seem like a lot, many of the proteins logged in the PDB are highly similar – those 1,700 proteins actually represent something like 40 percent of proteins with a known structure.
What does this mean to those of us who aren't biologists? If there’s a "next big thing" in pharmaceuticals, protein therapies are it. While there are still great strides being made in chemically derived, small-molecule pharmacology, biologic drugs – those derived from biology like protein therapies – open up whole new areas of pharmaceutical exploration. This is the area where the last two decades’ advances in understanding the human genome are just starting to pay off, hopefully leading to treatments for everything from inflammatory diseases to cancer.
But in order to create effective and safe protein therapies, pharmaceutical makers must first understand the structures of the proteins they hope to manipulate. Currently, most drugs are designed around a static picture of proteins, which – like most living things – are anything but. By offering researchers a clearer picture of how protein structures move and change, it should help them more quickly identify new potential therapies and reduce failures in clinical trials.
The 1,700 proteins, now partially available online to researchers worldwide, are just the beginning, as MoDEL will continue to grow as more proteins are better characterized. The researchers behind the project hope to have 80 percent of proteins relevant to treating human diseases available in MoDEL within two to three years.
[]
Data-Broadcasting Chip-on-a-Pill to Start Testing Within 18 Months
The ingestible chips would be activated by stomach acid to notify doctors that patients are taking their medicines on schedule and at the proper dose--a particularly important aspect of recovery for organ transplant patients. As such, the technology will originally be packaged with one of Novartis’s established transplant drugs that reduces the likelihood of organ rejection in patients.
But the company hopes its technology, which it recently secured from California-based , will be adopted as part of many regular pill regimens, transmitting a range of biological data to physicians so they can monitor not only their patients’ pharmaceutical intakes, but also how well the drugs are working. The ability to regularly monitor things like temperature and heart rate could help physicians better tailor a medication regimen for individual patients to ensure their dosage is as close to perfect as possible.
That’s all very cool, though the wireless beaming of medical data is likely to raise concerns with privacy advocates. But if better technology can bring about better medical results, it’s hard to argue that it shouldn’t be allowed--at the very least on an opt-in basis--just for privacy’s sake. Novartis hopes to have the pills in front of European regulators for assessment within 18 months. The way these things usually go, we’ll likely see it in the U.S. sometime after that, assuming it passes muster in the EU.
[]
Cockroach Brains Could Hold the Key to Next Generation of Antibiotics
The researchers identified nine different molecules found in the insects' nervous system tissues that are toxic to bacteria but harmless to human cells. Those tissues could be used to engineer new kinds of antibiotics that are effective in treating infections that are resistant to conventional drugs.
For strains of infectious bacteria like MRSA, that could be huge. MRSA is highly-resistant to the usual battery of antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections and is particularly troublesome in hospital environments where it can take up residence and be particularly difficult to eradicate -- kind of like an infestation of cockroaches. When conventional drugs don't work, doctors have to reach deeper into their medicine bags, and some of the treatments they are forced to fall back on have very unpleasant side effects on healthy human tissue.
Considering the pharmaceutical industry is having a hard time finding novel (or profitable) ways of combating drug-resistant bacteria like MRSA, this new method could provide a cheap source of effective antimicrobial drugs. So before you go crushing that tiny little pharma factory skittering across your living room floor, think twice. Then go ahead and do it. Cockroaches are disgusting, dude.
[]
Do Cloned Wild Animals Have Instincts?
Dresser uses domestic cats as surrogate mothers for African wildcat embryos, and although a tabby mother can calm the kittens, her influence doesn’t last. “They aren’t as hissy, and they don’t fight as much,” she says. “But once you get them away from domestic cats, especially once puberty sets in, their aggressive survival behavior emerges.”
Clones aren’t blank slates, Dresser explains. They’re exact genetic copies of another creature. The behaviors that make African wildcats successful hunters in the savannah are, fundamentally, made possible by the activation of just the right gene at just the right time. The first African wildcat whose DNA told its brain, “Hey, eat that field mouse” stood a better chance of surviving and reproducing, and when it did, its offspring inherited that trait and automatically expressed the same survival behavior. “Those genes pass on when you clone an animal, too,” Dresser says. “I think our clones’ behavior makes a strong case that instincts are at least partly genetic.”
So if scientists ever clone a saber-toothed tiger, it won’t end up in a Las Vegas magic act—it would probably rip your arm off. And sadly, a resurrected dodo wouldn’t know how to avoid repeating history. It would stand around like they all did, waiting to be clubbed back into extinction.
Have a science question you've always wondered about? Send a tweet to or email to fyi@popsci.com
Aiming High, DARPA Wants Inhalable Drugs to Counter Effects of Extreme Altitudes
The thinner air at high altitudes leads to a lack of oxygen in the blood and in tissues (think about how some players appear to lose a step when playing the Denver Broncos at home). That lack of oxygen, known as hypoxia, causes some nasty ill-effects, not least of which are fatigue and nausea. If you’re a commander that has just inserted fresh troops into a high-altitude hot zone, the last thing you want to hear is that they are immediately tired and sick.
The body adjusts to these lower oxygen levels naturally, but that can take days. Researchers at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, recipients of aforementioned $4.7 million, are tasked with creating inhalable drugs that can trim that acclimation time down to just minutes. By increasing the amount of nitric oxide – a natural compound released by red blood cells to dilate blood vessels – in the bloodstream, the drugs should be able to trick the body into delivering more oxygen to tissues so the high-altitude shock is numbed.
The timetable is as ambitious as the undertaking; in three years, DARPA wants animals and humans demonstrating greater physical ease in high-altitude environments. The researchers have already applied for FDA approval to try the stuff in humans.
Which is good for those of us who love the great outdoors but tend to be sidelined by alpine conditions. Like all great DARPA tech, this one will hopefully roll downhill to commercial partners, meaning soon enough there will be no excuse for ski vacations or hiking trips to be cut short by altitude sickness.
[]
Researchers Use Atomic Force Microscopy to Analyze Deep-Sea Mystery Molecules
Using atomic force microscopy, researchers in Scotland and Switzerland were able to see the molecular structure of a marine compound recovered from the Mariana Trench, whose chemical composition was unknown. And it took only a week to figure it out.
Previously, molecular imaging has relied on indirect methods like X-ray crystallography, which bounces X-rays off a molecule, or nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which examines how the atoms of a molecule absorb radio waves. But the new technique is akin to taking a snapshot or blueprint of the molecule.
Ultimately, the scientists realized they were looking at a compound that had already been isolated from a Taiwanese orchid.
Chemical compounds from the ocean could lead to new drug therapies -- painkillers synthesized from , for instance. But researchers have to find new chemical compounds first, and then they have to understand what they’re looking at.
In the new study, reported in Nature Chemistry, researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland examined a bacterium taken from a Mariana Trench mud sample. The bacterium, Dermacoccus abyssi, is pressure-tolerant enough to live at 35,814 feet beneath the sea surface, and it produces a chemical compound that the scientists couldn’t recognize.
They used high-resolution mass spectrometry to figure out what was in the compound, but they still could not figure out its structure. The only choice would be to take a chemical synthesis of the proposed structures, but that is complicated and can take several months. That’s where IBM stepped in.
IBM scientists used a technique called noncontact atomic force microscopy to take images of individual molecules at the atomic scale. Along with some density calculations, they determined the strange chemical was actually cephalandole A, which is already a candidate for new types of drugs, Nature News reports.
Leo Gross, who led the IBM research team in Zurich, says his technique can speed up the process of identifying exotic chemical compounds from Earth’s extreme regions.
Last year, Gross’ team showed they could make highly sensitive AFM instruments that can of a small organic molecule for the first time.
points out that the technique is not perfect -- some scientists wonder if the measuring method itself, which involves placing the molecule on a salt crystal, might interrupt the molecule’s structure. If you don’t know the shape to begin with, you can’t know whether the salt affects the shape.
But combined with indirect methods, it could help researchers quickly identify new compounds, which could speed up the process of producing new drugs, IBM says.
,
World’s First DNA-Based Logic Gates Could Lead to Injectable Bio-computers
Formed from short DNA strands and their complements, the DNA logic gates closely mimic their electronic counterparts by representing one of two states – like the zeros and ones of binary code – depending on the presence of an input. In tests, they modeled a DNA version of an XOR logic gate that generates an output when one of two inputs is present, but not when both or neither is present. By design, the DNA logic gate fluoresced when one of two inputs was present, and accurately stopped fluorescing when both inputs were present.
This kind of reverse biomimicry could have multiple applications, particularly in the realm of drug delivery, possibly even leading to preemptive drugs that live in the body waiting identify and deal with potential problems. Previous attempts at DNA-based computing were too limited to accomplish such a feat, as their DNA strands could be used for a function only once. But the Hebrew University team claims its strands reform after each step.
That means not only that the gates can be used over and over again, but that they can be wired in series, each one creating a new output that serves as the input for the next gate, the basis for complex calculations. The gates would then go back to their usual state, ready to process the next – possibly different – input.
The result could be a new breed of smart drugs that are injected into the body before an injury occurs, waiting to be triggered by enzymes or other catalysts associated with a particular injury or illness. That means – in theory – we might someday be able to create DNA-based computing systems that diagnose and treat common medical problems from within our bodies without our ever knowing it.
[]