Pharmaceutical Companies List - B

1. Balance Pharmaceuticals
2. Barakat Pharmaceutical Industries
3. Baxter International, Inc.
4. Baxter Vaccines
5. Bayer Group
6. Bayer Schering Pharma AGSource: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/
7. Beilis Development

Pharmaceutical Companies List - A

1. Abbott
2. Ablynx
3. Abraxis Pharmaceutical ProductsSource: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/
4. Academy Biomedical Company
5. Access Pharmaceuticals
6. Accredo Health Group
7. Actavis
8. ActiVery
9. Adolor
10. Advanced ChemTechSource: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/
11. Advancis Pharmaceutical

Vaccine for Metastatic Breast, Ovarian Cancer Shows Promise

Treatment with a recombinant poxviral vaccine showed a positive response in both metastatic breast cancer and ovarian cancer, according to a trial published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

"With this vaccine, we can clearly generate immune responses that lead to clinical responses in some patients," said lead researcher James Gulley, M.D., Ph.D., director and deputy chief of the clinical trials group at the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology at the National Cancer Institute.

Gulley and colleagues enrolled 26 patients and assigned them to monthly vaccinations with the PANVAC vaccine, which contains transgenes for MUC-1, CEA and three T cell costimulatory molecules.

These patients were already heavily pretreated, with 21 of them receiving at least three prior chemotherapy regimens.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Among the 12 patients with breast cancer, median time to progression was 2.5 months and median overall survival was 13.7 months. Four patients had stable disease.

For the 14 patients with ovarian cancer, median time to progression was two months and median overall survival was 15 months.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Following treatment, mild injection-site reactions were the most common side effect.

According to Gulley, interest in cancer vaccines is increasing and more study is needed to determine which vaccines will benefit which patients. "The sustained benefit seen in some patients in this study underscores the potential for therapeutic vaccines to impact clinical outcomes without toxicity," he said. "However, more studies in the appropriate patient populations are required to adequately assess efficacy."

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

New 'Smart' Nanotherapeutics Can Deliver Drugs Directly to the Pancreas

A research collaboration between the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston has developed "smart" injectable nanotherapeutics that can be programmed to selectively deliver drugs to the cells of the pancreas. Although this nanotechnology will need significant additional testing and development before being ready for clinical use, it could potentially improve treatment for Type I diabetes by increasing therapeutic efficacy and reducing side effects.

The approach was found to increase drug efficacy by 200-fold in in vitro studies based on the ability of these nanomaterials to both protect the drug from degradation and concentrate it at key target sites, such as regions of the pancreas that contain the insulin-producing cells. The dramatic increase in efficacy also means that much smaller amounts of drugs would be needed for treatment, opening the possibility of significantly reduced toxic side effects, as well as lower treatment costs.

The research was led by Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber M.D., Ph.D. and Kaustabh Ghosh, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital Boston. Their findings appear in the current issue of Nano Letters. Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, and Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Ghosh is now an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellows, Umai Kanapathipillai and Netanel Korin, also contributed to the work, as did Jason McCarthy, Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and an Assistant in Chemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Type I diabetes, which often strikes children and young adults, is a debilitating disease in which the body's immune system progressively destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. According to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, as many as 3 million Americans have the disease and some 30,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. The risk of developing Type I diabetes, which can lead to serious health complications such as kidney failure and blindness, can be predicted with 90 percent accuracy. But therapeutic intervention for people identified as high risk has been limited because many systemic treatments are barred from clinical use due to the severe side effects they produce when used at the high doses required to achieve a therapeutic response.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

"The consequences of Type I diabetes are felt in both the people who live with the disease and in the terrible strain that treatment costs put on the economy," said Ingber. "In keeping with our vision at the Wyss Institute, we hope that the programmable nanotherapy we have developed here will have a major positive impact on people's lives in the future."Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Using nanoparticles that can be programmed to deliver drug or stem cell therapies to specific disease sites is an excellent alternative to systemic treatments because improved responses can be obtained with significantly lower therapeutic doses and hence, fewer side effects. To date, such nanotherapeutics have been developed primarily to treat cancer, since they can home in on the tumor via its leaky blood vessels. The challenge has been to develop ways to selectively deliver drugs to treat other diseases in which the tissues of interest are not as easily targeted. The research team addressed this problem by using a unique homing peptide molecule to create "smart" nanoparticles that can seek out and bind to the capillary blood vessels in the islets of the pancreas that feed the insulin-producing cells most at risk during disease onset.

The research was supported by the Wyss Institute and a SysCODE (Systems-Based Consortium for Organ Design and Engineering) grant from the National Institutes of Health that supports a group of seven clinical and academic institutions working to develop new ways to induce regeneration of organs, including the pancreas.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Protein Structures Give Disease Clues

Using some of the most powerful nuclear magnetic resonance equipment available, researchers at the University of California, Davis, are making discoveries about the shape and structure of biological molecules - potentially leading to new ways to treat or prevent diseases such as breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

The findings appear in the latest issues of the journals Nature and Journal of Biological Chemistry.

"These are exquisite three-dimensional objects, and the structures really give insight into how they function in the cell," chemistry professor James Ames said.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Two recently published studies show what the campus can do with its 800-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, acquired with grant support from the National Science Foundation.

In a paper published online Jan. 29 by the journal Nature, Ames and colleagues at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge, England, offer insight into the hot topic of calcium channels, linked to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, among other things.

The researchers described the workings of two protein channels that are similar in structure and function. Inositol triphosphate is the "key" that unlocks the inositol triphosphate receptor, opening a gateway that releases calcium inside the cell. The ryanodine receptor does the same thing when it binds another molecule, ryanodine.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

The new three-dimensional view shows that although the sequences of these proteins are different, their structures at the "receptor end" are very similar.

"They are basically superimposable," Ames said. They are also interchangeable - if the "receptor end" of one is grafted to the "calcium channel end" of the other, the receptor still functions.

Researchers hope that understanding how inositol triphosphate triggers calcium flows, and how that process might be boosted or blocked, will lead to new ways to treat neurodegenerative diseases.

Calcium also features in a paper published Jan. 23 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Ames, David Sacks at the National Institutes of Health, and their colleagues show how a molecule called calmodulin, which is sensitive to calcium, interacts with the estrogen receptor.

When activated with the right amount of calcium, one calmodulin protein attaches to two estrogen receptors and draws them into a bear hug. That structure, or dimer, is then sensitive to the estrogen's attaching to another part of the molecule. In the right amounts, the combination of estrogen, calmodulin and calcium allows the estrogen receptor to attach to DNA and turn particular genes on or off.

The structure also reveals how calmodulin stops the estrogen receptor from being broken down and removed. Another protein, ubiquitin, is responsible for attaching to proteins inside cells and flagging them for disposal. Calmodulin blocks those parts of the estrogen receptor where ubiquitin can attach. That could result in a buildup of estrogen receptors — which is associated with tumor formation, Ames said.

X-ray crystallography at the University of Toronto figured in the inositol triphosphate receptor work, while Ames' team used the 800-megahertz nuclear MRI to work on the inositol triphosphate receptor and the calmodulin/estrogen receptor. Similar to the MRI machines used in hospitals, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy provides information about both the structure of molecules and how atoms are moving within them.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Coauthors on the Nature paper: Congmin Li, Davis; Min-Duk Seo, Noboru Ishiyama, Peter Stathopulos and Mitsuhiko Ikura, University of Toronto; Saroj Velamakanni, Ana Rossi, Samir Khan, Philippa Dale and Colin Taylor, at Cambridge University. Additional authors on the Journal of Biological Chemistry paper: Yonghong Zhang, UC Davis, and Zhigang Li, National Institutes of Health.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/

Support came from the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, England; the U.K. Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario.Source: http://biotechspectrum.blogspot.com/