Drug Detectives
Sunday, February 8, 2015 - 14:50
in Health & Medicine
Good drugs are hard to design: they must not only effectively treat a medical condition, but they must also do so without having side effects that outweigh their benefits. Sometimes, toxic side effects aren't discovered until late in development, when substantial time and money have already been invested. Now, researchers have devised a new drug screen that capitalizes on the tendency of toxic compounds to alter the properties of the lipid bilayer that encases cells.