High Content Screening

Protein Therapeutics – New ladders up the fruit tree By Dr Richard AG Smith Therapeutic proteins are often regarded as too technologically demanding, too costly, too restricted in routes or duration of administration or – in an era of massive opportunity provided by high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry and genomics – simply passe. This article […]

Biologically Relevant Chemistry By Dr Stephen A. Hill A large proportion of R&D expenditure relates to the investigation of compounds which ultimately fail to reach the market as useful medicines. We discuss why early drug discovery – using high throughput, automated in vitro and in silico methods, must become the primary testing ground for novel […]

Pharmaceutical Industry R&D Partnering Strategies By Riccardo Pigliucci Drug Discovery With a sustained rate of more than 250 R&D partnering deals each year many valuable lessons are being learned. Although there is no exact ‘formula for success’ there are many ‘success factors’ that can be utilised to reduce the risk of failure. Research & Development […]

Increasing the chances of lead discovery By Sandra Fox, MBA, Dr Helen Wang, Dr Lynne Sopchak and Dr Richard Khoury For HTS laboratories worldwide, the mission is to supply therapeutic groups in the shortest time possible with high quality hits and leads that will become drug candidates. Mounting pressure to screen more targets against 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 of which will significantly affect the path […]

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 interest within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry to better utilise […]

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 go to the most creative entrepreneurs who can […]

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 what we already have and what’s coming in […]

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 alone the real increase in industry R&D expenditure. In particular, […]

HTS a strategy for drug discovery By Dr AR Knight, Cerebrus Ltd Whichever technologies are implemented, high throughput screening is set to become one of the cornerstones of drug discovery, however deciding which strategy to implement will provide many headaches. This article concentrates on screens identifying the interaction of small molecules with protein targets rather […]

The Future Role of CROs By John M Hall PhD and Ludo Reynders PhD The increasing reliance by big pharmaceutical companies on CROs presents a mixture of challenges and opportunities for the industry. Given that the majority of customers are global in their reach, the CRO industry must be prepared to match that reach. Edmund […]

By Matthias Mann, Protein Interaction Laboratory (PIL), University of Southern Denmark Affinity proteomic methods can translate genomic data into validated targets for drug discovery. Baits such as tagged gene product or small molecules obtained from cell-based assays are used to purify interacting proteins. These proteins are then identified by high sensitivity, high throughput mass spectrometric […]

Using Expression Databases for Drug Discovery By Dr Greg Lennon Reference databases are being built cataloguing the amount of RNA each gene makes under different conditions and in different individuals. These databases can be mined easily and effectively to aid the drug discovery process. The success of the Human Genome Project provokes the question: what […]