pharmacology

The DEA emergency-scheduled SR-17018, a promising non-addictive pain and opioid-withdrawal compound discovered by University of South Florida researchers, as a Schedule I substance, halting planned human trials while cutting off a treatment many opioid users say helped them quit.

MIT Technology Review explores the race to develop 'exercise in a pill' drugs that mimic some benefits of physical activity for people with frailty, disability, or chronic illness, highlighting research on receptor-activating compounds and AMPK pathway drugs now entering human trials.

The article discusses the pharmacokinetics of dextromethorphan (DXM) and introduces dextroproporphan as a chemical analogue designed to improve its antidepressant effects by preventing conversion to DXO.

Introduces MARD, a 7B-parameter model for mechanism-level drug-drug interaction prediction using mirror-augmented reasoning distillation, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy at ~1% of frontier API cost and demonstrating genuine pharmacological reasoning over memorization.

This paper investigates how LLMs rely on morphological cues (affixes) to make pharmacological inferences, demonstrating that models can confidently generate plausible content for fictitious drug names based solely on affix heuristics, which poses a subtle safety risk.

This paper formalizes transcriptome-based drug design (TBDD) as a generative inverse problem and proposes CURE, a multi-resolution transcriptome-guided diffusion framework that generates drug molecules conditioned on desired transcriptomic state transitions.