In Silico Biology

Rules For Drug Discovery: Can simple property criteria help you to find a drug? By Dr Matthew Segall The years since the publication of Lipinski’s Rule of Five (Ro5) (1) in 1997 have seen the growth of a minor industry, dedicated to generating new ‘rules’ for drug discovery. Fuelled by what Kenny and Montanari have […]

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 of third generation sequencing, this […]

Cell Migration: Probing Cell Movement With Smarter Tools By Dr John Comley Cell migration comprises the movement of cells from one location to another in response to events, biological signals or environmental cues. Cell migration plays a critical role in numerous normal biological processes and also in many diseases. Most recent commercial activity around cell […]

Nanobioscience & Nanotechnology: The Future Of Personalised Medicine By Abhishek Gottipati, Joseph M. Sanders and Dr Scott A. Tenenbaum Nanotechnology has been more than a buzz word in the business world for a long time now and has been striding ahead, living up to the hype. There is a general ambiguity in defining ‘nanotechnology’ which […]

Innovate While Derisking Drug Development: Yes We Can! Taher Abbasi, Pradeep Fernandes, Dr Shireen Vali and Professor Gurkirpal Singh The outlook for the drug industry continues to remain bleak in context of productivity and success rates. In spite of ongoing increase in R&D expenses and technology revolutions in the genomics and proteomics area, nearly 95% […]

Combining chemists expertise and a computer’s advanced capabilities to generate good ideas. By Dr Matthew Segall, Edmund Champness, Dr Chris Leeding, Dr Ryan Lilien, Dr Ramgopal Mettu and Dr Brian Stevens Drug One of the defining challenges of drug discovery is the need to make complex decisions regarding the design and selection of potential drug […]

Free Online Resources Enabling Crowd-Sourced Drug Discovery By Dr Antony J. Williams, Valery Tkachenko, Dr Chris Lipinski, Professor Alexander Tropsha and Dr Sean Ekins The availability of freely accessible online resources to enable and support drug discovery has blossomed in recent years. The PubChem platform is now accompanied by a myriad of other online databases […]

Himarnessing fragment-based drug discovery at CRT By Dr Andrew P Turnbull and Dr Martin E Swarbrick In the past decade, fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) has gained increasing popularity in the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful alternative and complement to traditional high-throughput screening (HTS) as a source of preliminary hits for drug discovery. In theory, FBDD […]

Letting the Target Determine your Compound Acquisition Strategy By Dr John Harris With compound libraries likely to remain the cornerstone of hit and lead discovery for the foreseeable future, this paper seeks to summarise current and future approaches to optimal library design and compound acquisition, using examples and experimental evidence of the success, limitations and […]

Growing Interest in Outsourcing Ion Channel Services By Dr John Comley Summer 2008 Significant demand now exists in Pharma and Biotech to access ion channel testing services and this is reflected by the number and the variety of service offerings. In the highly competitive area of cardiac safety hERG testing price and turn-around time are […]