Novartis curates interactive history of medicine exhibition . ... Another firm active in this space is Pharma Mar ...

Beautiful Medicine highlights nature's role in the past and future of development .

PMLive 10th November 2015 .

Novartis has launched an interactive exhibition that showcases the role played by nature in the history of medicine.

Beautiful Medicine is a slick 'digital exhibition' that highlights the way natural substances have been used in medicines development and what the future could hold for this area of research.

For example, Novartis is currently cataloguing and experimenting with approximately 15,000 natural products as part of its efforts to screen their responses when added to diseased cells.

These responses are then examined the biological target of the natural compound as part of work to see which cellular protein it binds to and therefore which protein most likely plays a role in the disease.

Novartis is one of the few big pharmaceutical companies still involved in 'bioprospection' - developing new products based on existing biological resources. In pursuit of possible treatments for narcolepsy the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research has identified a class of compounds that temporarily blocks a receptor involved with regulating wakefulness - the starting point for which was its work on ergoline alkaloids, a class of natural products synthesized by fungi.

Another firm active in this space is Pharma Mar, whose marine-derived antitumoral agent Yondelis (trabectedin) received US approval last month to treat unresectable or metastic liposarcoma or leiomyosarcoma.

Una punción lumbar para detectar tumores cerebrales .

Jessica Mouzo Quintáns // Barcelona 10 NOV 2015 .

Una simple punción lumbar, un pinchazo a la altura de la zona lumbar para extraer el líquido cefalorraquídeo que baña el encéfalo y la médula espinal, tendrá la llave para diagnosticar los tumores cerebrales. Los escasos 150 mililitros de fluido cerebroespinal que recorren, en un circuito cerrado, el sistema nervioso central, guardan toda la información genética de las neoplasias cerebrales, incluso datos más precisos que los que ofrecen las biopsias tradicionales perforando el cráneo y extrayendo un trozo de tumor. Un equipo de investigadores del Vall d'Hebron Instituto de Oncología (VHIO) ha demostrado por primera vez que el análisis del LCR recogido a través de la punción lumbar permitirá a los oncólogos diagnosticar un cáncer de cerebro, caracterizarlo y tratarlo con gran precisión.

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