Expert opinion on emerging drugs
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Expert Opin Emerg Drugs · Mar 2012
EditorialEditorial update on emerging drugs for cancer cachexia.
Cancer cachexia is a multifactorial syndrome characterized by progressive skeletal muscle wasting and weakness. It affects most patients with advanced cancers, reduces quality of life and accounts for more than 20% of all cancer-related deaths. ⋯ However, the multifactorial pathogenesis indicates strongly that the most effective treatments will come from drug combination approaches. Drug treatments should ideally be combined with exercise training to maximize efficacy and ultimately reduce mortality and enhance the quality of life of patients with cancer cachexia.
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Expert Opin Emerg Drugs · Mar 2012
Editorial CommentEmerging therapies for treatment of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome.
In 2007, Bosma et. al provided a comprehensive review of emerging therapies for the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a condition which continues to carry a mortality rate of greater than 30%. Over the past several years, the development of novel and effective therapeutic agents for ARDS remains disappointing, and unfortunately, no recent therapeutic interventions have demonstrated a clear benefit. Herein, the results of several of these early and late phase clinical trials are reviewed, the majority of which address known maladaptive processes that have been deemed critical in ARDS pathophysiology. Based on the ongoing futility of current therapeutic models to yield effective therapies, it is speculated whether or not novel treatment paradigms, which address distinctly different aspects of this disease paradigm, may be warranted.
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Major depressive disorder (MDD) remains a major public health concern, and one that continues to suffer an incompletely-met need for effective and acceptable treatments. The development of antidepressants, to date, has focused primarily on increasing monoamine neurotransmission with increasing efficacy while minimizing adverse effects. Medications currently recommended as 'first-line' are far more tolerable than the older medications they replaced, but as many as 70% of patients continue to suffer significant depressive symptoms after treatment with one of these agents, and as many as 50% will discontinue a trial due to issues with acceptability. This review will summarize antidepressants that have recently entered the market as well as those still in development to help characterize the current state of antidepressant development. ⋯ The past decade has not yielded a large number of new antidepressants and, with the possible exception of agomelatine, none of the newer medications that have been introduced have decisively addressed the several unmet needs in this area of therapeutics. Among the various novel strategies that are being evaluated, results of several small studies of ketamine suggest that drugs that modulate glutamatergic neurotransmission may hold the greatest promise for exerting rapid and large antidepressant effects in patients who have not responded to SSRIs or SNRIs.