Immuno-Oncology's Biomarker Dilemma: How to add value in an uncertain development landscape By Dr Rachel Laing and Olivier Lesueur Given their ability to promote long-term survival in a percentage of cancer patients, PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors have fast become foundational cancer therapies. But knowing which patients may respond to these drugs… Read More
Kinases and Drug Discovery: Protein Kinases as a Validated Drug Target By Professor Said A. Goueli The role of protein and lipid kinases in cellular physiology and normal and abnormal growth has been well appreciated and has been the focus of intensive research in both academic arenas and pharmaceutical industries. Read More
A Strategic Vision For 21st Century Drug Discovery By Dr Wayne Bowen, Dr Giles Sanders, Dr Andreas Werdich, Dr Brian Warrington and Dr Elizabeth Farrant Delivering genuine therapeutic innovation is more challenging and complex than ever. Despite major scientific breakthroughs and technological advances leading to a greater understanding of the… Read More
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… Read More
Translational Chemical Biology: Gap assessment for advancing drug discovery, development and precision medicine By Dr Mukund Chorghade, Dr Michael Liebman, Dr Gerald Lushington, Dr Stephen Naylor and Dr Rathnam Chaguturu As yesterday’s lead molecule enters today’s clinical trial, the standard operating script seems to call for product developers and clinicians… Read More
By Dr Paul Denny-Gouldson For many years we have used the term bioinformatics to describe, well, anything outside cheminformatics in the R&D informatics domain. It has been a ‘catch-all’ term to label informatics tools that handle biologically relevant information. But the tools and software that have been labelled as such… Read More
Filling The Drug Discovery Abyss - Novel Business Models to Push Through the Valley of Death By Dr Swati Prasad, Dr Charles McOsker, Professor Kathryn Chapman and Dr Michael Foley Over the past three years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) have approved… Read More
Why Adopting AI is Essential for a Sustainable Pharma Industry By Professor Jackie Hunter Advancements in technology, and in particular, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionising the way that we live our lives. Up to now, we have used it to help us find the quickest route home or… Read More
3D Cellular Imaging - Advances and Considerations for High-Content Screening By O. Joseph Trask, Dr Daniel V. LaBarbera and Dr Kevin Quick Commercially available high-content imaging (HCI) systems, introduced in the 1990s, have provided the scientific community with a platform that offers a unique set of tools ideal for advancing… Read More
An Update on Hepatitis B Therapies By Dr John Sullivan-Bolyai The hepatitis B crisis is a worldwide unmet medical need. Hepatitis B (HBV) is the cause of a silent epidemic that has resulted in a worldwide healthcare crisis. Despite the significant burden it places on communities across the globe, hepatitis… Read More
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… Read More
CRISPR Cas9: Transforming Gene Editing in Drug Discovery Labs By Dr John Comley It is evident from a recent market survey on gene editing in drug discovery that CRISPR/Cas9 is now recognised as the superlative method when attempting a gene knockout or when introducing defined mutations, insertions or modifications to… Read More
Cell Therapy & Gene Therapy - The emerging fourth pillar of healthcare systems By Keith Thompson As the CEO of an organisation that deals exclusively in cell therapy and gene therapy, it is no surprise that I would champion the emergence of these products as the fourth pillar of medicine… Read More
Breath Based Biomarker Detection & Breath Biopsy - Informing drug development and future treatment regimes By Billy Boyle and Dr Mike Murphy The recent approval of the first liquid biopsy test for the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) demonstrates how biomarker-based detection tools are becoming important components of… Read More
By Dr Thomas Mehrling Increasingly, oncology agents are being used in combination. However, with complications such as drug resistance and unfavourable side-effect profiles, researchers have been looking for new ways to enhance treatment effect and tolerability. New fusion technology molecules appear to offer a beneficial synergy, but will this withstand… Read More
Ion Channels - Increasingly Enticing Targets For Drug Discovery by Dr Douglas Krafte and Deborah Erickson Drug discovery focused on ion-channel proteins began generating great value for pharmaceutical R&D programmes more than 30 years ago, giving rise to medicines still important in the pharmacopeia for treating human disease. Pfizer Inc’s… Read More
