Efficient Development of Drugs with Fewer Mice

Great potential to reduce the numbers of laboratory animals

19-Mar-2025 - New active ingredients such as antibodies are usually tested individually in laboratory animals. Researchers at UZH have now developed a technology that can be used to test around 25 antibodies simultaneously in a single mouse. This should not only speed up the research and development pipeline ...

X-ray snapshot: How light bends an active substance

An imaging technique established for decades applied to complex molecules for the first time

12-Mar-2025 - With the help of the world's most powerful X-ray laser, European XFEL, a research team led by Goethe University Frankfurt and the research centre DESY has achieved an important breakthrough: Using the example of the pharmaceutically active substance 2-thiouracil, they applied a long-established ...

Testing the effect of thousands of compounds on cellular metabolism

New applications for tried and tested medications

30-Jan-2025 - Researchers at the University of Basel are able to test the effects of more than 1,500 compounds on cell metabolism in parallel. Their analysis also led to the discovery of previously unknown mechanisms for known drugs. This approach could help scientists better predict side effects and find ...

Predicting the mode of action of new anti-cancer drugs with AI

Acceleration of the development of new cancer drugs

22-Nov-2024 - Plants, fungi and bacteria produce a variety of active substances that alter cell metabolism, sometimes to the point of cell death. This makes them promising candidates for new drugs against cancer and other diseases. Although a diverse range of bioactives exists, the further development of new ...

A new drug target for psychiatric disorders

11-Sep-2024 - Misha Kudryashev’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center has identified a molecular intermediate of a serotonin receptor that is involved in diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. The study points to a potentially new target for therapeutics. A new study published in “The EMBO Journal” points ...

Antimicrobial agents of the future

Researchers conducted the first systematic study of CRISPR-based antibiotics in Klebsiella pneumoniae

29-Apr-2024 - The antimicrobial potential of CRISPR-Cas systems is promising, yet how to best design or implement CRISPR nucleases remains poorly understood. An international team led by the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg has now addressed this knowledge gap. The ...

Analysis of single plant cells provides insights into natural product biosynthesis

Single-cell multi-omics reveals that cell types are differentially involved in the production and accumulation of medically relevant plant compounds

19-May-2023 - In a new study published in Nature Chemical Biology, an international team of researchers from the University of Georgia, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, presents a promising strategy for elucidating metabolic pathways for plant compounds of medicinal ...

Drug diversity in bacteria

Researchers decode mechanism for diversifying bioactive phenazines

26-Mar-2019 - Bacteria produce a cocktail of various bioactive natural products in order to survive in hostile environments with competing (micro)organisms. In the current issue of Nature Chemical Biology, researchers at Goethe University demonstrate that they do so by modifying basic structures, similar to ...

Faster characterization of organic salts

27-Mar-2018 - UZH researchers have developed a novel method that speeds up the process of determining crystal structures of organic salts and significantly reduces the effort required to do so. As about 40 percent of all active pharmaceutical ingredients are salts, this new crystallographic method is set to ...

Drug or duplicate?

Quantum cascade lasers can reliably detect a substance‘s »fingerprint«

26-Mar-2018 - Imagine holding two different medications in your hands, one being the original, the other one being a counterfeit. Both appear exactly the same. Is there any way for you to distinguish them? The answer is: yes. Our quantum cascade laser (QCL) has the ability to identify substances in a split ...