The Genie in the Test Tube – From Gene to Gene Therapy: Part 2 By Dr Jan Steiner In the previous edition, we discussed gene therapy in terms of potential vectors and their applications. Now, we discuss the potential clinical uses of these constructs. Read More
The promise of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics By Dr Tim Peakman and Dr Steve Arlington Within the next 10 years the benefits of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics will inevitably outweigh the disadvantages. But what are the commercial and legal implications for the pharmaceutical industry especially for companies who have… Read More
High Throughput Screening (HTS) – Where next? By Dr Mark Beggs After approximately a decade of maturation and a three orders of magnitude increase in capabilities, High Throughput Screening (HTS) is now an established discipline within pharmaceutical discovery. But opposing stresses exist within the screening world; the resolution… Read More
The Integration Abyss By Dr Scott D. Kahn The long-standing disconnect between target discovery/characterisation and compound discovery is a major challenge facing the pharmaceutical industry in its quest to develop innovative therapies from the wealth of information flowing from the human genome. There is enormous… Read More
Discovery Research in the Co-Genomic Era – Biology goes industrial By Dr Timothy Wells and Dr Georg Feger The parallel between the search for gold in the last century and drug discovery in the co-genome era is very clear. As with all gold rushes the rewards will… Read More
Drug Delivery – Adding value to drug development and commercialisation By Dr Cornelis ‘Cees’ Winnips The importance of drug delivery as a tool to improve R&D productivity, to provide a pathway for valuable drugs to be successfully commercialised and as an expanding resource to the pharmaceutical and biotech… Read More
Do venture capitalists act as gatekeepers of new technology? By Dr June Grindley and Samantha Smart This article discusses the important role that venture capitalists and others play in helping to create companies around new technologies. We asked a number of venture capitalists, when… Read More
High-throughput Crystallisation By Dr Sara Moran and Dr Lance Stewart With structure-based drug design on the increase can the development of high-throughput crystallisation fulfil its promise to revolutionise the drug discovery process? In an era when the development of drugs is hindered by… Read More
The Industrialisation of Bioinformatics By Dr Alex Titomirov With the completion of the ‘draft’ sequence of the human genome predicting an estimate of 40,000-120,000 genes that describe us, the real work begins. The problem now is not lack of data but lack of tools to thoroughly analyse… Read More
By Dr David C. U’Prichard It is almost axiomatic that the pharmaceutical R&D industry has not achieved in the last decade an increase in productivity (measured as high value NCEs) commensurate with the explosion of new biological information, chemistry techniques and information storage/retrieval/examination systems, let… Read More
By Peter Ertl, Wolfgang Miltz, Bernhard Rohde and Paul Selzer Readily accessible tools with easy to use interfaces, especially integrated into regularly used desktop applications, can improve the impact of cheminformatics in pharmacological research. Starting either from a single molecule or from a… Read More
By Michael P. Murphy, MSc Pharmacogenomics offers the opportunity to adopt a new paradigm in drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is faced with a number of challenges including relatively low productivity and success in bringing new drugs to market. Investors demand that pharmaceutical companies… Read More
The role of toxicogenomics in drug discovery By Dr Robin E. Neft and Dr Spencer Farr The information that toxicogenomics can bring in terms of toxic mechanisms, safety and efficacy must ultimately have a major impact on the drug discovery process. Large scale genome sequencing has… Read More
By Dr Ashok R. Dongre and Dr Stanley A. Hefta The genomic sequencing efforts spawned the field of proteomics by providing the basic blueprint for protein sequences, enabling proteomics to become the contemporary technology for studying the underlying mechanisms of disease. This review… Read More
Harnessing the CRO Intellect By Ian Lennox and Dr Nigel Brown There is no question that pharmaceutical companies are qualified to perform their own discovery and preclinical research. However, to fully exploit the new technologies in the early research phases, to maximise drug leads, and to minimise… Read More
The Genie in the Test Tube – From Gene to Gene Therapy: Part 1 By Dr Jan Steiner For thousands of years, medicine was a descriptive art, with treatments for disease arising from astute observation and trial and error. The rise of modern forms of… Read More
