A novel approach to identifying potential anticancer drug combinations revealed that pairing cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins with cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors might provide an effective approach to treating intractable melanomas driven by mutations in the NRAS and KRAS gene.

An international research collaboration led by scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the University of Dundee, in the U.K., have developed a way to efficiently and effectively make designer drugs that hit multiple protein targets at once. This accomplishment, described in the Dec. 13, 2012 issue of the journal Nature, may prove invaluable for developing drugs to treat many common human diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, cancer, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder.

A newly found understanding of receptor signaling may have revealed a better way to design drugs. A study from Nationwide Children's Hospital suggests that a newly identified group of proteins, alpha arrestins, may play a role in cell signaling that is crucial to new drug development. The study appears in PLOS ONE.

Encouraging safety and efficacy data on novel and emerging therapies presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) signal an important step forward in the development of treatment strategies for patients with hard-to-treat leukemia, myeloma, and myelofibrosis.

Breast cancers are defined by their drivers - estrogen and progesterone receptors (ER and PR) and HER2 are the most common, and there are drugs targeting each. When breast cancer has an unknown driver, it also has fewer treatment options - this aggressive form of breast cancer without ER, PR or HER2, which was thought not to be driven by hormones, is known as triple negative.

The latest Access to Medicine Index, which ranks the top 20 pharmaceutical companies on their efforts to improve access to medicine in developing countries, finds that the industry is doing more than it was two years ago, with GlaxoSmithKline still outperforming its peers, but an expanding group of leaders closing the gap.

Treating Parkinson's disease patients with the experimental drug GM1 ganglioside improved symptoms and slowed their progression during a two and a half-year trial, Thomas Jefferson University researchers report in a new study published in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences.