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CDC diagnostic coronavirus test gets FDA emergency approval

In the light of the ongoing novel coronavirus epidemic in China, the US Food and Drug Administration has granted approval of a diagnostic test for use in emergency situations (emergency use authorization or EUA). The viral infection has spread to many different and distant parts of the world, involving over 25,000 people and causing nearlyContinue reading “CDC diagnostic coronavirus test gets FDA emergency approval”

Modeling study estimates spread of 2019 novel coronavirus

Senior author Professor Gabriel Leung from the University of Hong Kong highlights: “Not everyone who is infected with 2019-nCoV would require or seek medical attention. During the urgent demands of a rapidly expanding epidemic of a completely new virus, especially when system capacity is getting overwhelmed, some of those infected may be undercounted in theContinue reading “Modeling study estimates spread of 2019 novel coronavirus”

Russian researchers come up with faster method to discover antibiotics

Russian biochemists have identified a promising new class of antibiotics. Having studied over 125,000 molecules, they found that 2-pyrazol-1-yl-thiazole derivatives exhibit antibacterial properties. One of the discovered compounds has demonstrated a good activity and low cytotoxicity, and thus can serve as a prototype in further studies. The paper was published in The Journal of Antibiotics. TheContinue reading “Russian researchers come up with faster method to discover antibiotics”

Dozens of non-oncology drugs can kill cancer cells

“We thought we’d be lucky if we found even a single compound with anti-cancer properties, but we were surprised to find so many,” said Todd Golub, chief scientific officer and director of the Cancer Program at the Broad, Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at Dana-Farber, and professor of pediatrics at Harvard MedicalContinue reading “Dozens of non-oncology drugs can kill cancer cells”

This ‘lemon’ could help machine learning create better drugs

Purdue University drug discovery researchers have created a new framework for mining data for training machine learning models. The framework, called Lemon, helps drug researchers better mine the Protein Data Base (PDB) — a comprehensive resource with more than 140,000 biomolecular structures and with new ones being released every week. The work is published inContinue reading “This ‘lemon’ could help machine learning create better drugs”

Plant-derived SVC112 hits cancer stem cells, leaves healthy cells alone

The red, tube-shaped flowers of the firecracker bush (Bouvardia ternifolia), native to Mexico and the American Southwest, attract hummingbirds. The bush also provides the chemical bouvardin, which the lab of University of Colorado Cancer Center and CU Boulder researcher, Tin Tin Su, PhD, and others have shown to slow a cancer’s ability to make proteinsContinue reading “Plant-derived SVC112 hits cancer stem cells, leaves healthy cells alone”

How is Chemoinformatics Used in Drug Discovery?

Chemoinformatics is a relatively new principle of chemistry and is based upon the processing of data concerning chemical and molecular structures through the use of computational analysis. The analysis of these data allows the relationship between chemical structure, chemical properties, and molecular activity to be studied. It is an in silico technique, which means itContinue reading “How is Chemoinformatics Used in Drug Discovery?”