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Giving drug dropouts a new lease of life - Researchers in the US have designed a molecular container that can encapsulate drug molecules and increase their solubility - in one case by almost 3000 times. The new container appears to have low toxicity and can be built from readily available reagents. The finding opens the possibility of re-testing drug candidates that failed because they were insufficiently soluble or improving existing low-solubility drugs. Reference: D Ma et al, Nat. Chem., 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1326