Building New Models of Drug Discovery in Europe - The Innovative Medicines Initiative By Dr Angela Wittelsberger, Dr Hugh Laverty and Dr Michel Goldman The discovery and development of a new medicine is time-consuming, risky and expensive. It often takes 10-15 years and an investment of on average >$1 billion… Read More
Digital PCR (dPCR) and Real-Time PCR (qPCR): A time and place for each By Dr George Karlin-Neumann and Dr Rachel Scott When it comes to DNA research, scientists often find themselves weighing digital PCR (dPCR) against the more established quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR). Which technique is better to use? The… Read More
Biomarker Discovery: The Need For New Generation Peptide-Protein Microarrays By Dr Nikolai Schwabe and Katherine Catchpole The progression from health to disease is marked by significant biological changes within an individual (1). Clinically presenting symptoms, however, can be non-specific and variable enough to hinder diagnosis, and may appear only after… Read More
Gene Editing: Re-writing Genomes With Targetable Nucleases By Dr Dana Carroll We are in the midst of a revolution in genome engineering, based on reagents that can be designed to cut chromosomal DNA at arbitrary sites. These targetable nucleases allow creation of new mutations at specific sites, introduction of designed… Read More
The Great Neuro-Pipeline Brain Drain - Why Big Pharma Hasn't Given Up On CNS Disorders By Julia Skripka-Serry Central Nervous System (CNS) disorders bear an economic burden of more than $2 trillion in the US and EU and rake in upwards of $80 billion a year for the pharmaceutical industry. Read More
By Dr Alejandra Solache, Robert Brockett, Trinette Chuang, Dr Robin Clark, Rey Dimagiba, Dr April Fisher, Dr Wayne Speckmann and Dr Chun Yang Antibodies have become a vital tool among researchers in the life sciences and are routinely being used in a number of diverse immunoassay applications, including Western blotting… Read More
Outsourced Kinase Profiling Services: Adding Value To In-House Kinase Programmes Dr John Comley Biochemical kinase profiling using a large panel of kinases with a broad coverage of the human kinome has become the de facto norm within the Pharma industry. The importance of this activity is demonstrated by the large… Read More
Unrevealing Biological Secrets By Single Cell Expression Profiling By Dr Mikael Kubista and Dr Anders Ståhlberg During the last 30 years exceedingly sensitive and accurate technologies have been developed to measure and quantify amounts of nucleic acids and proteins. With techniques such as quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) and nextgeneration sequencing… Read More
A Decade of RNAi Screening: Too much hay and very few needles By Bhavneet Bhinder and Dr Hakim Djaballah RNAi screening is arguably the fastest growing field with the premise to better understand gene function at the genome level. It has been hailed as the second genomics wave, and in… Read More
Laboratory Automation Advances High Throughput Bio-Inspired Research Into Personalised Medicine By Dr Joshua LaBaer The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University plays an important role in addressing global healthcare challenges by developing bio-inspired solutions that can be translated into commercially viable products and clinical practices. With 11 different research centres,… Read More
Multi-Parameter Flow Cytometry Technology Advances for Rare Cell Analysis and Sorting By David Gebhard and Dr Diether Recktenwald The study of rare cell populations is important to advance medical diagnostics and therapeutics. For many clinical studies, rare cell counts promise to provide valuable alternate end points; examples are circulating tumour… Read More
DNA Sequencing: Latest Developments In Next-Generation Sequencing By Andrew Szopa-Comley Next-generation sequencing has expanded the frontiers of genomic research, opening up new avenues of enquiry and offering insights into diverse areas of biology. Rapid developments in this field are dramatically lowering costs and increasing speeds. With the arrival… Read More
Diverging Paths, Difficult Choices - Challenges Facing Pharma By Dr Steve Arlington and Dr Nick Davies Pharma is poised on a knife-edge. Major scientific and technological advances, together with socio-demographic changes, rising demand for medicines and trade liberalisation, will revive its fortunes in another decade. But in the meantime it… Read More
Metabolomics: Analytic Methods Driving Exponential Understanding By Dr Ian D. Jardine Metabolomics is distinct from genomics and proteomics in several significant respects. Where genes and proteins are unique to specific organisms, metabolites are ubiquitous throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. Compared with proteomics and genomics, which quantify the building blocks… Read More
Epigenetics: Are We Hitting The Mark? By Dr Andrew J. Pope and Dr Amy M. Quinn During the last few years, advances in the understanding of epigenetic processes have led to an explosion in interest in this area as a potential source of new targets for the discovery of medicines. Read More
Ubiquitination, E3 Ligases and Drug Discovery - Novel technologies for a challenging pathway By Dr Neil Wilkie and Dr Steve Davies Does ubiquitin drug discovery provide the opportunity for a new class of therapeutic agents? This article argues that new technological advances are removing many of the barriers that have… Read More
