Biomarkers: Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Development in the Current Regulatory Landscape.

Biomarkers are widely used at every stage of drug discovery and development. Utilisation of biomarkers has a potential to make drug discovery, development and approval processes more efficient. An overview of the current global regulatory landscape is presented in this article with particular emphasis on the validation and qualification of biomarkers, as well as legal framework for companion diagnostics. Furthermore, this article shows how the number of approved drugs with at least 1 biomarker used during development (biomarker acceptance) is affected by the recent advances in the biomarker regulations. More than half of analysed approvals were supported by biomarker data and there has been a slight increase in acceptance of biomarkers in recent years, even though the growth is not continuous. For certain pharmacotherapeutic groups, approvals with biomarkers are more common than without. Examples include immunosuppressants, immunostimulants, drugs used in diabetes, antithrombotic drugs, antineoplastic agents and antivirals. As a conclusion, potential benefits, challenges and opportunities of using biomarkers in drug discovery and development in the current regulatory landscape are summarised and discussed.

The molecular basis of protein toxin HicA-dependent binding of the protein antitoxin HicB to DNA.

Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are present in many bacteria and play important roles in bacterial growth, physiology, and pathogenicity. Those that are best studied are the type II TA systems, in which both toxins and antitoxins are proteins. The HicAB system is one of the prototypic TA systems, found in many bacterial species. Complex interactions between the protein toxin (HicA), the protein antitoxin (HicB), and the DNA upstream of the encoding genes regulate the activity of this system, but few structural details are available about how HicA destabilizes the HicB-DNA complex. Here, we determined the X-ray structures of HicB and the HicAB complex to 1.8 and 2.5 Å resolution, respectively, and characterized their DNA interactions. This revealed that HicB forms a tetramer and HicA and HicB form a heterooctameric complex that involves structural reorganization of the C-terminal (DNA-binding) region of HicB. Our observations indicated that HicA has a profound impact on binding of HicB to DNA sequences upstream of hicAB in a stoichiometric-dependent way. At low ratios of HicA:HicB, there was no effect on DNA binding, but at higher ratios, the affinity for DNA declined cooperatively, driving dissociation of the HicA:HicB:DNA complex. These results reveal the structural mechanisms by which HicA de-represses the HicB-DNA complex.