Coalition Against Major Diseases: Precompetitive Collaborations and Regulatory Paths to Accelerating Drug Development for Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Precompetitive collaborations have been successful in several disease areas and industries. Such collaborations are critical to address the gaps and challenges in therapeutic development for chronic neurodegenerative diseases. On November 5, 2012, members of the scientific community, advocates, regulators, industry, and government officials met at the US Food and Drug Administration to develop tools to expedite drug development and maximize the potential for success in future drug trials for Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. The meeting established that multiple collaborative approaches are essential for accelerating drug development. Such approaches include precompetitive data sharing, regulatory qualification of biomarkers and clinical outcome assessments, implementation of data standards, and development of quantitative drug disease trial models. While challenges to collaboration among industry partners are formidable, they are not insurmountable. The Coalition Against Major Diseases (CAMD) has several positive examples to highlight. This review represents proceedings from CAMD's annual conference and discusses the key themes that are being advanced by the Critical Path Institute.

Chiral separation of lipoxygenase metabolites utilizing high-performance liquid chromatography.

An isocratic, reversed-phase HPLC assay has been developed for the separation of the enantiomers of four lipoxygenase metabolites, without the need for a derivatization step. Separation of the enantiomers was studied on a polysaccharide type chiral stationary phase column. Upon determination of suitable mobile phase composition, the assay was evaluated at various temperatures. In all cases the R enantiomer eluted before the S enantiomer. The best separations were observed at 0 degrees C.

Development of an HPLC method for the analysis of Apomine in a topical cream formulation.

A stability indicating, reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed for the quantification of Apomine, tetraisopropyl 2-(3,5-di-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyphenyl)-ethyl-1, 1-bisphosphonate, in a topical cream formulation. Analysis of Apomine in the cream formulation was performed through a dilution of the cream base with tetrahydrofuran. This allowed the current method to bypass extraction and/or centrifugation for direct injection and analysis. Separation was achieved using an Alltima C18 5 microm, 150 mm x 2.1 mm column and employed a gradient procedure, beginning with acetonitrile-water (65:35, v/v), at 0.6 mL/min for 9 min, followed by a rinse with isopropyl alcohol for 9 min. The complete gradient method has been optimized to separate Apomine from the nonpolar cream components, wash and equilibrate the column in a 30-min assay. This report demonstrates that this method is effective for quantification of Apomine in a cream formulation.