Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Adaptive Designs and Big Data.

Drug development faces the double challenge of increasing costs and increasing pressure on pricing. To avoid that lack of perceived commercial perspective will leave existing medical needs unmet, pharmaceutical companies and many other stakeholders are discussing ways to improve the efficiency of drug Research and Development. Based on an international symposium organized by the Medical School of the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and held in January 2016, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of three specific areas, i.

Public-Private Partnerships in Lead Discovery: Overview and Case Studies.

The pharmaceutical industry is faced with significant challenges in its efforts to discover new drugs that address unmet medical needs. Safety concerns and lack of efficacy are the two main technical reasons for attrition. Improved early research tools including predictive in silico, in vitro, and in vivo models, as well as a deeper understanding of the disease biology, therefore have the potential to improve success rates.

Industry-academia collaborations for biomarkers.

Several types of collaboration are being pursued to identify, validate and apply new biomarkers. Here, we highlight examples of such initiatives and discuss the challenges, approaches to address these challenges and key factors for success.

3-D high-frequency ultrasound backscatter analysis of human articular cartilage.

High-frequency ultrasound is a promising method for non-invasive characterization of cartilage degeneration. Surface reflection and integrated spectral parameters are often used. In the work described here, human cartilage samples with varying degrees of degeneration were measured using a 40-MHz transducer.

Surgical treatment of spondylodiscitis.

Background: Spondylodiscitis is a rare bacterial infection of the vertebra and intervertebral discs with an inflammatory, destructive course.

Methods: To gain further information about the management and clinical course of spondylodiscitis, we retrospectively reviewed 32 patients in 2002 who had surgical interventions between 1992 and 2001.

Results: The mean age of patients was 61 years (29-78 years).