Drug Discovery

Oral contraceptive pills are currently only available for women. Recently, a compound purified from a Chinese herb is found to have the ideal properties of a male contraceptive drug: efficient, reversible and non-toxic. Could a male birth control pill…

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh used caffeine to understand how fungi become resistant to antifungal drugs.

by Sebastian Rowe What would you do if I gave you $2.6 billion? For pharmaceutical companies, the answer is develop a drug. Not a handful, not a few… a single drug. $2.6 billion is the estimated development cost of each Food and Drug Administration…

by Christopher Gerry Our DNA influences our height, eye color, affinity for sky diving and other extreme thrills, sleep habits, disease risk factors, and more. It’s no surprise, then, that scientists have found another job for our reliable genetic…

by Michael Vinyard figures by Nicholas Lue Most therapeutic drug candidates that are put through clinical trials fail. Given that most of these fail during early development, the cost of bringing a single drug to market is now over $2.5 billion. If we…

While you are likely familiar with the annoying experience of being a mosquito’s ‘meal of the day’, more is going on behind the scenes of that insect bite than meets the eye.  Mosquitoes, which are drawn to human scent and breath, require proteins from…

Approximately 12% of Americans experience migraines. For some people, the attacks are so frequent and painful that episodes can be incapacitating. Historically, doctors have tried a variety of approaches to treating the condition, including drugs that…

by Christopher Gerry The routes that lead to a career in biomedicine are as diverse as they are plentiful, but one of my colleagues has taken a particularly unorthodox path. Sonia had just graduated from law school when she learned of a “typo” in her…

by Michael Vinyard figures by Jovana Andrejevic and Michael Vinyard Why do we have cures and medicines for some diseases but not others? Surprisingly, it is not because we cannot make the medicines; it is because we do not know enough about the diseases…

High-resolution microscope image of antibiotic-resistant bacteria killing a white blood cell. [Image ‘Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Bacteria’ from NIAID]It’s an all-too-common refrain nowadays, but antibiotic resistance…