All Pharmaceutical Articles
  • Experiment reveals the ugly side of open-source journal industry

    Pamela Lewis Dolan Medical & Allied Healthcare

    Over the past 10 months, Harvard researcher John Bohannon, Ph.D., has created more than 300 versions of a phony research paper describing the anticancer property of a chemical extracted from a lichen. Each paper was authored by a different made-up researcher who came from academic facilities that don’t exist. Despite Bohannon’s efforts to make the papers flawed and unpublishable, nearly 160 medical journal publishers accepted the paper for publishing, despite each one claiming to have a peer review process.

  • Is Parkinson’s disease in the future for Jesse Pinkman of ‘Breaking…

    Dr. Denise A. Valenti

    ​AMC's television series "Breaking Bad" depicted diverse characters on both sides of the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine. The popular series, which ended its six-year run with a series finale Sept. 29, was known for its raw, graphic and violent depiction of the culture and science behind the making and distribution of illicit drugs.

  • Emergency medical equipment donations in developing countries

    Maria Frisch

    In the summer of 2012, I served in rural areas of Kenya, working with AMREF Flying Doctors to bring medical interventions to communities in need. To say this was a humbling experience would be an understatement. We flew by helicopter into areas not accessible by vehicle in order to assess community medical infrastructure and to aid in the design and provision of emergency medical management protocols.

  • Is startup biotech funding at risk?

    Mike Wokasch

    Over the past couple of decades, small biotech companies have been an invaluable source of exciting new drug treatments. As a result, investors have been handsomely rewarded for funding these high-risk, speculative technologies that helped fill depleted Big Pharma pipelines. Companies with any hope for delivering a return on investor money have two possibilities; have one of their technologies acquired or have the entire company acquired by a cash rich Big Pharma or Big Biotech.

  • Finding the right partner to solve the lyophilization challenge

    Peter Soelkner

    About 30 percent of all parenteral drugs approved by the FDA in the past few years involved freeze-dried substances. Experts are predicting a possible rise to even 50 per cent in the future. It's definitely a challenge for R&D as well as commercial filling. Therefore many pharmaceutical and biotech companies rely on outsourcing partners. But how to find the right partner for the challenge?

  • Big Pharma replaces innovation with acquisition

    Mike Wokasch

    Big Pharma (including Big Biotech) has executed about 130 mergers or acquisitions in each of the past couple of years. The overwhelming majority of deals designed to fill depleted Big Pharma pipelines with more novel and innovative technologies in later stages (closer to market) than their own R&D had been able to produce.

  • Microfluidic systems for screening of aptamers

    Dr. Afsaneh Motamed-Khorasani

    ​Systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) is a method to screen the nucleotide ligands from a large library of nucleotide sequences. Aptamers are the nucleotide ligands selected by SELEX method and can be easily and inexpensively produced. Chemical modification and integration into different analytical methods is also easy with aptamers.