3D Cell Culture Developments to Improve In Vitro Analyses By Prof Stefan Przyborski Improved in vitro models are required to aid the identification and assessment of candidate molecules for pharmaceutical development. Conventional cell culture models involve the growth of cells on two-dimensional (2D) substrates. Cells adapt to this synthetic 2D… Read More
Enabling the Promise of Stem Cells By Robert Shaw and Dr Jeff Till The remarkable potential of stem cells to generate several hundred differentiated cell types is driving their use for regenerative medicine and for supporting the traditional drug discovery and development process (Figure 1). However, sustained progress in these… Read More
The Post Genomic Era: What Does It All Mean? By Dr Chris Torrance Information may no longer be a bottleneck to understanding and tackling complex genetic diseases such as cancer. For those who cut their research teeth not so very long ago, before PCR was thought of by Kary Mullis,… Read More
By Michael Werner, Morrie Ruffin and Elizabeth West The regenerative medicine market offers phenomenal opportunities for growth in the next few decades. However, there are still major issues to be addressed to enable this nascent industry to truly flourish, especially with regard to investment and the attitudes of regulatory agencies… Read More
By Dr Cliff Murray Drug Discovery The pharmaceutical industry is still struggling to cure cancer despite pouring enormous resources into the search for new treatments. We take a look at the some of the current technologies for the discovery and delivery of molecular diagnostic, prognostic and predictive tests and speculate… Read More
Epigenetics: An Emerging Target Class for Drug Screening By Dr John Comley Heightened awareness of the potential importance of epigenetic targets in many disease areas, and growing vendor interest in developing new assays to screen DNA methylation and histone modifications encouraged HTStec to undertake market research in this area in… Read More
The Benefits Of Drug Repositioning By Dr Aris Persidis Drugs in development, on the market, or those that are shelved because of lack of efficacy, are excellent starting points for further development. Finding new indications for such drugs will benefit patients who will see a potential new therapy sooner, will… Read More
Balancing A Biologics Pipeline Portfolio By Dr Herren Wu Research into groundbreaking biologic therapies has significantly shifted the diagnosis and treatment paradigms for many disease categories, particularly in oncology, autoimmune, inflammation and neurology. Discovering and developing an innovative, first-in-class biologic has the potential to offer patients significant benefits as well… Read More
Making Early Access Real: getting treatments to patients with no other option By Dr Rav Seeruthun For patients who have no other option to treat their condition, early access to drugs in clinical development can be critical. As a trained physician, there is an intrinsic understanding that early access to… Read More
High Throughput Screening Systems: Impact of Reliability on Downtime and Drug Discovery By Dr John Comley This article reports the results of a survey on the reliability of automated HTS assay systems and the effect of reliability on output. Evidence supporting the view that high throughput screening (HTS) systems have… Read More
Protein Biomarker Immunoassays: Opportunities and Challenges By Dr M. Walid Qoronfleh and Dr Klaus Lindpaintner With the biopharma industry under heavy pressure, transforming the scientific interchange between the laboratory and the clinic is exceedingly critical. Realising the costly toll of drug attrition in late-stage development, many companies are turning to… Read More
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: A model for transforming drug discovery By Dr Dwight Morrow and Dr Julie Holder Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have the potential to transform drug discovery by providing physiologically relevant cells for toxic compound identification, target validation, compound screening, and tool discovery. The technology for generating… Read More
Moving Forward With Label-Free Technology By Dr Jennifer Hartigan, Cindy Liu and William Downey Label-free technology is gaining acceptance and opening doors for new drug discovery. Relatively new in the well-established world of high throughput screening (HTS), label-free technology provides opportunities for probing biomolecular interactions without spatial-interference, auto-fluorescent or quenching… Read More
Assessing the Value of R&D Partnerships By Dr David A Pardoe, Dr Jackie Hunter MBE, Dr Robert M Cooke and Dr Paul Barrett In response to the need to increase the return on investment in R&D, many large Pharma companies are shifting from an internal fixed resource model to more… Read More
R&D Open Verdict? By Dr Kay Wardle As pharmaceutical companies begin to shift from in-house R&D to external partnerships and 'open innovation', the traditional drug discovery model may soon be a thing of the past. In this article we explain what is driving these changes and what the implications are… Read More
New Ways to Optimise Therapeutic and Diagnostic Antibodies By Dr Markus Enzelberger Monoclonal antibodies are the fastest-growing category of research within the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Several monoclonal antibodies are listed in the top 10 selling blockbusters, and the market forecast predicts that the number of monoclonal antibodies within the… Read More
