Featured Articles
IMMUNOGENICITY TESTING - Regulatory Updates for Immunogenicity Assessment of Therapeutic Proteins
Leon Shi, PhD, Lan Li, MS, and Jing Shi, PhD, provide a high-level analysis of the significant changes to the guidance compared to the immunogenicity draft guidance released in 2016, and the implications for drug development programs.
SPECIAL FEATURE - Injection Devices: Will COVID-19 Deliver Growth to the Market?
Contributor Cindy H. Dubin interviews several leading companies and highlights trends in autoinjectors, pen injectors, wearable devices and connectivity, and prefilled syringes.
FORMULATION FORUM - Formulation Development Strategy for Early Phase Human Studies
Jim Huang, PhD, says successful translation of discovery compounds into first-in-human and first-in-patient is one of the key challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry, and to achieve this, a rational formulation development strategy will be critical to avoid costly development failures, while speeding up the development timeline in a cost-effective manner.
DRUG DEVELOPMENT - Bringing New Drugs to Patients Faster by Integrating Traditionally Separate Pharma Development Functions
Nutan Gangrade, PhD, says reducing R&D project timelines saves on overhead in development while increasing the likelihood of primacy in the marketplace (which engenders significantly more sales) and describes new approaches drug developers are taking to streamline drug development.
GENE-EDITING TECHNOLOGY - The Importance of Assessing Off-Target Effects of CRISPR Gene Editing
Mark Behlke, MD, PhD, says gene editing raises legitimate questions and fears about possible risks and misuse, and given the relative technical ease and low cost of CRISPR gene editing, this is likely to find widespread use in both medicine and agriculture.
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW - AMO Pharma: Identifying & Developing Cancer Pathway Therapeutic Candidates for Use in New Neurological Indications
Michael Snape, PhD, AMO Pharma’s Chief Scientific Officer, discusses the company’s research focus and efforts to understand and target the mechanism of action of CNS disorders associated with developmental delay with the potential to target neurogenetic disorders at their root cause.
DEVICE DEVELOPMENT - Mapping the Regulatory Strategy to Better Navigate Electronic Drug Delivery Device Development for Patient Safety & Security
Ahmed Mallek, Hadrien Gremillet, and Audrey Chandra say that along with technology advancement in the medical industry, the behaviors and needs of different stakeholders also evolve, resulting in a clear interest in electronic drug delivery devices for a variety of reasons.
PEPTIDE THERAPEUTICS - Oral Peptide Therapeutics – Opportunities Abound as Barriers Fall
John S. Vrettos, PhD, says numerous technologies are currently in development that are designed to enable the oral delivery of peptides. Though each has its unique set of properties and capabilities, all must overcome key obstacles to successfully deliver peptides via the oral route.
COMBINATION PRODUCTS - Development Challenges & Solutions
Tom McLean says combination drug development pipelines continue to rapidly expand and diversify with differentiated molecules and formulations, which can call for nuanced as well as significant packaging and delivery system requirements.
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW - Nuritas Pharma: Life Changing Peptide Drug Discoveries for a Changing World
Nora Khaldi, PhD, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nuritas, discusses the company’s innovative approach to accelerating the discovery of novel therapeutic peptides that address unmet patient needs in multiple disease areas.
2020 Analytical Testing in Drug Development e-Book: A Critical Role in End-to-End Drug Development
This second annual Drug Development & Delivery Analytical Testing eBook shines a light on analytical outsourcing providers that are optimizing testing solutions to ensure more robust results, speed time to market, and characterize methods earlier in development.
2020 Respiratory Drug Development eBook – Inhaled Medications for Treating Unconventional Respiratory Diseases
This second annual Drug Development & Delivery Respiratory eBook focuses on a few companies that are taking inhalation devices to a new level in drug delivery.
THERAPEUTIC FOCUS - The Future of Treating Alzheimer’s Disease: Aducanumab & Beyond
Hermann Russ, MD, PhD, and Alexander Gebauer, MD, PhD, believe the times when amyloid beta as a drug target have been dubbed a dead horse in the race for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease are now over.
SPECIAL FEATURE - Outsourcing Formulation Development & Manufacturing: Specialized Capabilities for Small & Large Molecules
Contributor Cindy H. Dubin interviews key players in the CDMO market who present case studies about how they are helping pharmaceutical and biopharma companies overcome a variety of formulation and manufacturing challenges.
PFS MANUFACTURING - Prefilled Syringes & Biologics: The Perfect Partnership of Medicine & Delivery
Anish Parikh charts the twin rise of biologics and PFS, outlines some of the common challenges associated with filling and dispensing, and discusses how a patient-centric partnership approach can help biopharmaceutical companies shorten the development pathway and ensure a reliable supply of safe, effective medicines for the people who need them.
GENE THERAPY - The Role Viral Vectors Play in Current Gene Therapy Development
Dieter Lingelbach, MBA, discusses the history and science of viral vectors, their current applications, and why they are a vital component in contemporary gene therapy development.
FORMULATION FORUM - Application of Captisol® Technology to Enable the Formulation of Remdesivir in Treating COVID-19
James Pipkin, PhD, Vince Antle, PhD, and Rebecca Garcia-Fandiño, PhD, explain why more Captisol® than ever is required to meet Gilead’s bold goals of making remdesivir available to COVID-19 patients in the US and to hundreds of countries around the world.
FORMULATION DEVELOPMENT - Formulating Immediate-Release Tablets for Poorly Soluble Drugs
Gayatri Khanvilkar, MPharm, Ajit Bhagat, Sangmesh Torne, PhD, Tejas Gunjikar, PhD, and Amina Faham, PhD, present a case study showing that previously unviable APIs can be successfully processed with the right methods, which should give hope to formulators facing similar difficulties.
CHIMERIC COMPOUNDS - “Dopastatins”: One Molecule Targeting Two Receptors for the Treatment of Pituitary Tumors
Heather Halem, PhD, and Michael D. Culler, PhD, believe this novel class of compounds represents a potential treatment for neuroendocrine tumors that are vulnerable to the synergistic dual activation of somatostatin and dopamine receptors.
NEXT-GENERATION TUMOR TARGETING - Leveraging the Tumor Microenvironment to Change the Standard of Care
Vishwas Paralkar, PhD, highlights a unique platform technology that represents the first technology that has successfully been used to target cancer drugs to tumor cells in animal models, while sparing healthy tissue.
