Tony Kouzarides is passionate about ecosystems: well-balanced communities that flourish on mutual and dynamic interactions. But the ecosystems that excite him are not made up of plants, animals and environments. They’re made up of experts.
When a drug fails late on in clinical trials it’s a major setback for launching new medicines. It can cost millions, even billions, of research and development funds. Now, an ‘adaptive’ approach to clinical trials and a genetic tool for predicting success are increasing the odds of picking a winner.
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.
The stirrings of a revolution are starting to ripple through hundreds of laboratories. It’s a revolution that aims to result in new medicines – faster and with fewer failures – and it’s being led by three UK universities and three global pharmaceutical companies.
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.
Dr Jag Srai, Head of the Centre for International Manufacturing at Cambridge's Institute for Manufacturing, and colleagues are developing new ways to help companies embrace the challenges and opportunities of digitalising the extended supply chain. Here, he provides a glimpse of this digital future.
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.
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.
© 2025 University of Cambridge