Articles about 'drugs'

Nanotechnology is creating new opportunities for fighting disease – from delivering drugs in smart packaging to nanobots powered by the world’s tiniest engines. 

Trevor Lawley and Gordon Dougan are bug hunters, albeit not the conventional kind. The bugs they collect are invisible to the naked eye. And even though we’re teeming with them, researchers are only beginning to discover how they keep us healthy – and how we could use these bugs as drugs.

Researchers are working with pharmaceutical companies to make improvements across the whole supply chain, from how a pill is made to the moment it is swallowed by the patient.

How will precision medicine define 21st-century therapeutics? What will future healthcare look like? And what actually lies ‘beyond the pill’? Professor Chris Lowe, inaugural Director of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, takes the long view on the future of therapeutics.

An analysis of a new drug’s journey to market, published today in the BMJ, shines a light on financial practices that see some major pharmaceutical companies relying on a cycle of acquisitions, profits from high prices, and shareholder-driven manoeuvres that threatens access to medicines for current and future patients.

People who are addicted to cocaine are particularly prone to developing habits that render their behaviour resistant to change, regardless of the potentially devastating consequences, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge. The findings may have important implications for the treatment of cocaine addiction as they help explain why such individuals take drugs even when they are aware of the negative consequences, and why they find their behaviour so difficult to change.

An approach that could reduce the chances of drugs failing during the later stages of clinical trials has been demonstrated by a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

Lawrence King (Department of Sociology) and Piotr Ozieranski (University of Bath) discuss how EU member states use complex policy instruments to determine how much they are willing to pay the pharmaceutical industry for its products.

Cambridge research that has for the first time successfully grown “mini-livers” from adult mouse stem cells has won the UK’s international prize for the scientific and technological advance with the most potential to replace, reduce or refine the use of animals in science (the 3Rs).

These and similar drugs are the second most prescribed on the NHS