unmet medical needs
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2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Vikram Gota ◽  
◽  
Diana Varghese ◽  
Shayma Karbelkar ◽  
◽  
...  

Biosimilars are biologic products that are highly similar to a licensed reference biologic, with no clinically meaningful differences in quality characteristics, biological activity, safety, or efficacy. Biosimilars can help to fulfill unmet medical needs due to their cost effectiveness while at the same time being as efficacious as the innovator drug. They can also improve patient access to otherwise costly innovator biologics. India has the largest number of approved biosimilars as compared to the US and Europe. However, the numbers of clinical studies that are conducted to prove the biosimilarity are lesser than the number of biosimilars approved, which is evident by the number of CTRI registrations done. Some studies have shown the quality of biosimilars approved and marketed in India to be inferior to the innovator drug. This raises concerns regarding the quality of the biosimilars. In this review, the similarities and differences in the guidelines, the approval process, and quality enforcement measures prevailing in the three regulatory regions of USA, Europe and India are discussed. Changes in the approval process and post approval monitoring of drugs and manufacturing facilities are recommended in order to ensure sustained quality standards of drugs entering the market.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (24) ◽  
pp. 7463
Author(s):  
Marianna Nalli ◽  
Michela Puxeddu ◽  
Giuseppe La Regina ◽  
Stefano Gianni ◽  
Romano Silvestri

There are promising new therapeutic agents for CRC patients, including novel small-molecule inhibitors and immune checkpoint blockers. We focused on emerging CRC’s therapeutic agents that have shown the potential for progress in clinical practice. This review provides an overview of tyrosine kinase inhibitors targeting VEGF and KIT, BRAF and MEK inhibitors, TLR9 agonist, STAT3 inhibitors, and immune checkpoint blockers (PD1/PDL-1 inhibitors), for which recent advances have been reported. These new agents have the potential to provide benefits to CRC patients with unmet medical needs.


Toxins ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 834
Author(s):  
David Burgin ◽  
Cindy Périer ◽  
Gavin Hackett ◽  
Mark Elliott ◽  
Daniel Kwan ◽  
...  

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are notorious toxins and powerful agents and can be lethal, causing botulism, but they are also widely used as therapeutics, particularly to treat neuromuscular disorders. As of today, the commercial BoNT treatments available are from native A or B serotypes. Serotype F has shown efficacy in a clinical trial but has scarcely been used, most likely due to its medium duration of effect. Previously, the uniqueness of the light chain of the F7 subtype was identified and reported, showing an extended interaction with its substrates, VAMPs 1, 2 and 3, and a superior catalytic activity compared to other BoNT/F subtypes. In order to more extensively study the properties of this neurotoxin, we engineered a modified F7 chimera, mrBoNT/F7-1, in which all the regions of the neurotoxin were identical to BoNT/F7 except the activation loop, which was the activation loop from BoNT/F1. Use of the activation loop from BoNT/F1 allowed easier post-translational proteolytic activation of the recombinant protein without otherwise affecting its properties. mrBoNT/F7-1 was expressed, purified and then tested in a suite of in vitro and in vivo assays. mrBoNT/F7-1 was active and showed enhanced potency in comparison to both native and recombinant BoNT/F1. Additionally, the safety profile remained comparable to BoNT/F1 despite the increased potency. This new modified recombinant toxin F7 could be further exploited to develop unique therapeutics to address unmet medical needs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Brown ◽  
Jayaprakash Nair ◽  
Maja Janas ◽  
Yesseinia Anglero-Rodriguez ◽  
Haiyan Peng ◽  
...  

Abstract RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics are a new class of medicines that can address unmet medical needs by silencing disease-causing gene transcripts. While delivery of short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to hepatocytes has yielded multiple drug approvals, novel delivery solutions are needed to expand the reach of RNAi therapeutics. Here we report that conjugation of 2'-O-hexadecyl (C16) to siRNAs enables efficient silencing in the central nervous system (CNS), eye, and lung of multiple nonclinical species with broad cell type specificity. Intrathecally delivered C16-siRNAs are active across CNS regions and cell types, with sustained silencing for at least three months, which is an especially important outcome considering the challenging dosing route. Similarly, intravitreal and intranasal administration of C16-siRNAs resulted in potent and sustained knockdown in the eye and lung, respectively. Efficient delivery facilitated through C16 conjugation to optimized siRNA designs has enabled candidate selection for investigational human clinical trials assessing therapeutic silencing beyond the liver with infrequent (e.g. bi-annual) dosing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ju-Chun Pei ◽  
Da-Zhong Luo ◽  
Shiang-Shin Gau ◽  
Chia-Yuan Chang ◽  
Wen-Sung Lai

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects ~1% of the world's population. It is clinically characterized by positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Currently available antipsychotic medications are relatively ineffective in improving negative and cognitive deficits, which are related to a patient's functional outcomes and quality of life. Negative symptoms and cognitive deficits are unmet by the antipsychotic medications developed to date. In recent decades, compelling animal and clinical studies have supported the NMDA receptor (NMDAR) hypofunction hypothesis of schizophrenia and have suggested some promising therapeutic agents. Notably, several NMDAR-enhancing agents, especially those that function through the glycine modulatory site (GMS) of NMDAR, cause significant reduction in psychotic and cognitive symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Given that the NMDAR-mediated signaling pathway has been implicated in cognitive/social functions and that GMS is a potential therapeutic target for enhancing the activation of NMDARs, there is great interest in investigating the effects of direct and indirect GMS modulators and their therapeutic potential. In this review, we focus on describing preclinical and clinical studies of direct and indirect GMS modulators in the treatment of schizophrenia, including glycine, D-cycloserine, D-serine, glycine transporter 1 (GlyT1) inhibitors, and D-amino acid oxidase (DAO or DAAO) inhibitors. We highlight some of the most promising recently developed pharmacological compounds designed to either directly or indirectly target GMS and thus augment NMDAR function to treat the cognitive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Overall, the current findings suggest that indirectly targeting of GMS appears to be more beneficial and leads to less adverse effects than direct targeting of GMS to modulate NMDAR functions. Indirect GMS modulators, especially GlyT1 inhibitors and DAO inhibitors, open new avenues for the treatment of unmet medical needs for patients with schizophrenia.


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