In Silico Biology

Culture Biosciences and Cytiva are collaborating to advance innovation in upstream bioprocessing by providing customers greater access to predictive and robust scale-up capabilities.   Together, the companies aim to bring new bioprocess solutions to customers that use digitaliation, in-silico approaches, and virtual monitoring and control of experiments.  As the first step in this new collaboration, Cytiva’s […]

Sekkei Bio, an India-based company dedicated to building technologies for drug and vaccine design with global impact, has implemented CDD Vault as the main platform to house its research data.   Sekkei Bio has made progress toward finding therapies for diabetes and pain, and has a management team with a track record of successfully bringing drugs […]

By Dr Jamie Freeman Base editing is a potentially transformative technology for engineering DNA in cells that has the potential to generate knockouts or correct certain errors or mutations in the DNA for applications such as cell or gene therapies. Compared with currently-available gene editing methodologies such as CRISPR/Cas9, which creates ‘cuts’ in the gene […]

Evonetix collaborates with imec to scale-up chip-based technology production for third generation DNA synthesis platform. EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the synthetic biology company developing a desktop platform for scalable, high-fidelity and rapid gene synthesis, today announced it has partnered with imec, a world-leading research and innovation hub active in the fields of nanoelectronics and digital technologies, […]

The CRISPR revolution arrives in immuno-oncology By Helen Stewart-Miller and Thomas Hope Volume 21 Issue 2 – Spring 2020 CRISPR-cas9 technology is having an exciting impact on drug discovery as a whole, but more specifically CRISPR presents enormous opportunities in targeted screening for immuno-oncology research. Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) were first detected in […]

Reprogramming the stem cell for a new generation of cures By Dr Alex Davenport, Dr Tonya Frolov and Dr Mark Kotter Volume 21 Issue 2 – Spring 2020 The development of new and effective treatments with the potential to cure, or at the very least ease patient suffering, has been the driving force in biomedical […]

By Dr Steve Arlington and John Wise As part of its mission to help members anticipate and prepare for changes in the pharmaceutical industry, The Pistoia Alliance has developed a research paper which sets out to consider what the life science, biopharma R&D and healthcare ecosystem might look like in 2030, in particular how the […]

How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Drug Design By Dr Mark Roberts and Dr Sam Genway AI could create a streamlined, automated approach to drug discovery, trawling vast datasets to identify targets, find candidate molecules and predict synthesis routes. Getting there will require significant vision, but we are already seeing exciting examples of AI helping direct […]

Fail Early, Fail Fast – A phenotypic rescue approach By Dr Anne-Marie Zuurmond, et al. New disease targets frequently emerge in literature, but the thorough target validation required to consider these targets for a drug discovery programme is often lacking. In pharmacological or genetic perturbation studies using complex biological assays, undesired off-target effects cannot be […]

Automating Automation – How close are we to Artificial Intelligence impact? By Dr Michael A. Tarselli, Dr Yohann Potier and Dr Alan E. Fletcher In terms of consistency, repeatability, known errors and sheer volume, there exists perhaps no better collection of data for computer learning than that emerging from automated processes. Many common lab procedures […]

Application of bioinformatics in support of precision medicine By Mike Furness and John Wise Bioinformatics has played a major role in gene sequencing diagnostics and has been an essential tool to investigate the genetic causes of disease. With the support of new technologies and tools, bioinformatics can play an important part in the support and […]

Flow Cytometry – The advanced systems overcoming drug discovery pain points By Helen Stewart-Miller and Dr Richard Massey Flow cytometry is an invaluable technique for the characterisation of highly heterogeneous cell populations. Thanks to improvements in throughput, automation and multichannel detection capabilities, recent years have seen its use expand across a wide range of drug […]

How Mergers and Acquisitions Will Drive Oncology Research in 2019 By Dr Michael Seiler 2019 got off to a fast start for oncology drug discovery, with numerous mergers, acquisitions and collaborations announced in quick succession. These ventures provide a window into key trends in oncology research, where investigators are likely to focus their efforts, and […]

Mining Plant Genomes – A modern approach to herbal healing By Michelle Vierra Plants are stationary soldiers. Rooted to one spot, they are not able to chase nutrients or flee from herbivores and pathogens. So in addition to the basic metabolites they synthesise for their survival, they produce a diverse array of organic compounds through […]

Integrated Platform Drug Discovery and Development Companies – Part 2: Comparative analysis By Dr Stephen Naylor and Dr Kirkwood A. Pritchard Jr Spring 2019 Large pharmaceutical companies have struggled to efficiently implement tools, technologies and platforms into their drug discovery and development (DDD) programmes. More recently there have been attempts by small-to-medium sized pharmaceutical companies […]

The Future Of Drug Discovery – Cutting-edge technologies meet traditional paradigms in assay development By Dr Roger Bosse With more than 1,500 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the market, the easiest disease targets are already covered (1). Today’s scientists are challenged to find new compounds, acting alone or in combination, […]