Current Drug Discovery Technologies - Volume 3, Issue 4, 2006

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) is a lethal disease with a poor prognosis where incidence mirrors mortality. Gemcitabine and gemcitabine plus erlotinib (epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor) are the only FDA approved therapies for unresectable or metastatic PDA and are at best palliative. Hence, considerable efforts have been initiated to identify novel targets for monoclonal antibody (Mab) therap Read More

Cells, tissues and organs function in a three-dimensional (3D) environment. Ideally, cell-based models that capture both the 3D organization and multi-cellular complexity of the native system provide the most powerful tools for screening the effects of therapeutic candidates. This approach to drug discovery bridges tissue engineers, who are constructing 3D tissues, with biologists, who are studying healthy versus diseased state Read More

The decrease in the drug approval rate by the FDA and the recent failure of some blockbuster drugs has prompted a re-examination of the focus of the pharmaceutical industry on increasing drug selectivity. As a result, it has been proposed that the most efficient cure is in developing promiscuous drugs and selective drug mixtures. Rational design of drug mixtures has been nearly impossible due to the lack of informat Read More

Goatskin is used instead of rat-skin to study the permeation and the results are compared. The percentage of permeation is double in goatskin. We have five different oils to study, how they influence permeation and all of them have improved permeation when used on goatskin. To analyze further two parameters-percentage and rate of permeation are used. When these five oils are used with salicyclic acid on goatskin the f Read More