Assay development & optimisation

The Mass Spectrometry Innovations Simplifying Drug Discovery Workflows Helen Stewart-Miller and Dr Richard Massey Mass spectrometry (MS) has long been a valuable tool for drug discovery, and steady advances in its capabilities and performance have generated powerful insights for the pharmaceutical industry. The latest mass spectrometry innovations are now helping biotherapeutics developers overcome challenges around […]

Disruptive Approaches To Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development (Part 1) By Ibis Sanchez- Serrano, Dr Tom Pfeifer and Dr Rathnam Chaguturu This article is part 1 of 2, and covers tools, technologies and the core model of disruptive approaches to accelerate drug discovery and development. Tesla intends to implement and practise an ‘open source’ philosophy […]

Technology Innovation Will Help Prepare Drug Discovery for Smart Screening Era By Dr Clive Green and Dr Philip Spencer Drug discovery is undergoing a transformation powered by advances that magnitude more molecules and enable smarter selection of compounds. We are on the cusp of having previously unimaginable amounts of information about each target and many […]

Automated Liquid Handler Vendor vs Third Party Plastic Company by Dr John Comley Competing for the disposable pipette tip business. Users of automated liquid handlers today invariably have a choice – obtain disposable pipette tips from the original instrument vendor or purchase a ‘compatible’ product from a third party plastics manufacturer or lab supplier. Increasingly, […]

I Robot. I, The Future – Robotics Within and Beyond The Lab Richard Holland The Pistoia Alliance (whose membership includes most of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies, technology vendors and publishers active in the life science R&D sector), is keenly interested in discovering the ways in which innovation through pre-competitive collaboration can be used to […]

By Dr John Comley High-content screening (HCS) is a well-established approach for the multiparametric analysis of cellular events. Since its first introduction more than a decade ago, high content imaging systems have continually evolved with many improvements enabled to meet user demands of greater flexibility and the growing requirements of assays involving complex cellular disease […]

Phenotypic Drug Discovery: Striving towards the highest level of biological relevance By Dr John Comley Phenotypic drug discovery (PDD) implies screening where the molecular mechanism of action is not assumed and does not require knowledge of the molecular target. As such phenotypic drug discovery is comparable to empirical screening, which was historically used in drug […]

New Developments in Single Cell Separation and Analysis Technologies By Dr John Comley Drug Discovery Recent advances of single cell technologies are facilitating the opportunity to discern biological insights within individual cells and providing a means to reveal previously hidden relationships between individual cells within a population. Single cell technologies can be crudely split between […]

Individualised Systems Medicine: Next-Generation Precision Cancer Medicine and Drug Positioning By Tea Pemovska, Paaivi Östling, Caroline Heckman, Olli Kallioniemi and Krister Wennerberg A growing number of oncology drugs are currently clinically available and more than a thousand compounds are being developed for oncology indications. Thus, the challenge is to systematically develop all these drugs to […]

Epigenetic Targets: On the verge of becoming a major new category for successful drug research By Dr John Comley Most vendors of epigenetic modification proteins and reagents have enhanced and broadened their offerings in recent years. Of particular note is the increasing range of proteins and binding assays that now support research on the Bromodomains […]