Targets In-Depth Focus 2018

In this In-Depth Focus:

• Omics-informed drug target discovery in combating emerging infectious diseases
  The catastrophic consequences of ever-increasing rates of death from infectious diseases demands new experimental strategies for drug target selection and drug design. Over the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry has been wounded by several issues including failure of drug-development programmes, burgeoning cost of drug development, increasing regulatory control, lack of innovation and declining productivity of therapeutic drugs in the market.
• Self-delivering RNAi: paving the way for a new class of cancer immunotherapies
  Earlier this year, the National Cancer Institute published its annual report to the nation on the status of cancer stating that there will be nearly 1.8 million new cases of cancer in 2018. New therapies have developed over time to improve cancer patient outcomes, including antibody immunotherapies targeting immune checkpoints, such as PD-1. An example is KEYTRUDA® (pembrolizumab), which came to the market in 2014 to treat solid tumours. Immunotherapy is rapidly becoming a powerful tool available to physicians and patients to attack cancer with fewer side effects than traditional standard treatments such as surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.