Acknowledging AstraZeneca's hugely successful hormonal breast cancer therapy, anastrozole (Arimidex), Frost & Sullivan presented the company w
The results of the ALFAUR (ALFuzosin in Acute Urinary Retention) study, announced today at the XIXth European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Vienna, Austria, indicate that the uroselective alpha1-blocker alfuzosin 10 mg once daily (OD) may hav
Even more health professionals will be able to prescribe medicines under new plans announced today by Health Secretary, John Reid. The proposals recommend that physiotherapists, radiographers, chiropodist
An international team led by a dermatologist at The University of Manchester has found that treatment with the emerging drug infliximab, marketed as Remicade, can quickly and significantly improv
The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has announced its decision to extend Ebixa's current indication (moderately severe to severe disease) to include moderate stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Upon implementation of this
The warning about possible liver-related problems with the depression drug, Cymbalta, has been expanded and doctors are being cautioned against its use in chronic liver disease patients.Drug company Eli Lilly has issued a new label for the anti
A promising new antibiotic, moxifloxacin, produced by Bayer Healthcare is about to be tested against tuberculosis, a disease that kills 5,000 people a day. Tuberculosis is also the imm
A 60 mg low-dose version of the prescription weight-loss medication orlistat (marketed by GlaxoSmithKline as Xenical 120 mg) was found to be safe, effective and tolerable in overweight individuals, according to new data presented today at the 2005 Annu
The court victory of British woman Barbara Clark to be treated with the breast cancer drug Herceptin, means that now more than 100 breast cancer patients in Cornwall and Devon could soon be prescribed the drug. Cancer charity
Functional genomics and proteomics have been quite successful in identifying functions of potential therapeutic targets such as encoded proteins. In fact, the possibilities of identifying more than 10,000 novel tar
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a four-year, $9 million contract to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and five other academic medical centers to create a network of Treatment Units for Research on Neurocognition and Schizophrenia (TURNS). The research will test the effectiveness of new drug treatments for the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia. The project will be directed by Stephen R. Marder, M.D., at UCLA with investigators at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Duke University, Durham, Washington University, St. Louis, and Nathan Klein Institute, New York.
Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disease. Approximately 1 percent of the population develops schizophrenia during their lifetime - more than 2 million Americans suffer from the illness in a given year. Although available medications are reasonably effective in treating the positive symptoms of the illness such as hallucinations and delusions, recent research indicates that cognitive impairments in areas such as attention, memory and problem solving are responsible for much of the disability associated with the disease.
"Unfortunately, the medications currently available do little to remedy this aspect of the illness. Consequently, many patients have serious residual symptoms and only one in five are able to recover sufficiently to work," said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of NIMH.
The NIMH approach is built on the assumption that progress in developing new treatments will require collaboration between the best academic, government and industry scientists. The TURNS is one component of a multipronged NIMH effort to stimulate academic and industry sponsored research focused on cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. It follows completion of the Measurement and Treatment Research for Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS). The goals of MATRICS are to identify the most promising science-based ideas regarding the neurochemical basis of these deficits, and to achieve a broad academic, industry and regulatory agreement on the best way to measure cognition in clinical trials.