We provide thought partnership. When a company is developing a drug, there's a lot of work involved, such as understanding the science, designing a study and generating good data. We come in and explain what the standard of care looks like today for their patient population, and what we think it will look like in five to eight years or whenever they plan to launch their therapy.
Laboratories turned to a smart workaround when COVID‑19 testing kits became scarce in 2020. They mixed samples from several patients and ran a single test. If the test came back negative, everyone in it was cleared at once. If it was positive, follow-up tests would zero in on who was infected. That strategy, known as group testing, saved valuable time, money, and resources.
In our latest IPWatchdog Unleashed podcast, I spoke with Rob Sahr, shareholder at Wolf Greenfield and co-chair of our 2025 Life Sciences Masters™ program. Our conversation zeroed in on a hard truth the public rarely sees: moving a molecule from early discovery to an FDA-approved therapy requires a chain of scientific and economic miracles-and every one of them leans on a reliable patent system.
This year, the White House has broadcast its intent to greatly reduce animal experimentation in the United States. In early April, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would require less testing on animals for the development of a widely used class of drugs-an approach, the agency says, that should speed up the drug-development process and eventually lower drug prices.
Until now, preclinical trials relied primarily on two-dimensional cell cultures and animal models, which often failed to accurately replicate human biology. Since 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not required animal testing, thanks in part to organoids, which Hans Clevers (Eindhoven, 68 years old), professor of molecular genetics at Utrecht University, has been researching since the beginning of the century.
More than 50 percent of lung-transplant recipients experience a rejection of their new lung within five years of receiving it, yet the reason why this is such a prevalent complication has remained a medical mystery. Now, a new Northwestern Medicine study published in JCI Insight has found that, following transplant and in chronic disease states, abnormal cells emerge and "conversations" between them drive the development of lung damage and transplant rejection.
Since the mid-1940s, the National Institutes of Health has sent billions of dollars to university researchers whose work has led to the creation of scores of lifesaving treatments for a range of diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease. By one estimate, NIH-funded research was linked to roughly 99 percent of drugs that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved between 2010 and 2019.
They hoped to make tomorrow's medicines. Then came Trump. This is Camila. She's trying to figure out how cancer spreads across the body. David here is trying to cure H.I.V. And Rachael, she's trying to find new treatments for childhood brain cancer. Or at least they were. The Trump administration has so far terminated more than $1 billion in grants for the National Institutes of Health. It has fired over 1,300 employees. 1,700 canceled awards.
Pedro Cuatrecasas was an influential biochemist who contributed to the development of approximately 40 drugs including acyclovir for herpes and atorvastatin for cholesterol management.
Working on that timescale has long stymied biologists, but the rapid evolution of time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy (TR cryo-EM) over the past several years has made it possible to reconstruct dynamic processes with near-atomic detail.
Evans' discovery of nuclear hormone receptors has transformed drug development, impacting treatments for diseases like diabetes and cancer, and underscoring the influence of biochemistry in medicine.
