Novel Drug Targets From Phenotypic Screening By Dr Jim Freeth, Dr Elizabeth Kingsley & Jo Soden Identifying functional molecules with the potential to be developed into new therapeutics is often the sole aim of phenotypic drug discovery. However, the approach also provides valuable opportunities to uncover previously unknown, disease-specific drug… Read More
How The B6 Mouse Strain is Revolutionising Drug Discovery By Dr Philip Dube Inbred mice are critical tools in biomedical research and one particular strain, known as C57BL/6 (Black 6 or B6, for short), is rapidly becoming the standard model for many applications and revolutionising modern research. Understanding the B6… Read More
The Rise of Immunotherapies - Strategies to Accelerate Their Advance Into Clinical Trials By Edward Cribb The striking rise of immunotherapies in the past decade has had a transformative effect on the prospects for the treatment of patients with cancer. Also referred to as biologic therapies, immunotherapies are a new… Read More
New Approaches to Sample Identification Tracking and Technologies for Maintaining Stored Sample Quality By Dr John Comley Safeguarding the quality of stored samples (both compounds and biospecimens) must be the driving ethos in compound management stores and biorepositories. Yet there are few innovations in available sample storage technologies that can… Read More
The Importance of Heterocyclic Compounds in Anti-Cancer Drug Design By Simon Pearce Heterocycles are key structural components of many of the anti-cancer drugs available on the market today. Indeed, of the novel molecular anti-cancer agents approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2015, almost two-thirds contained heterocyclic rings within their… Read More
Tackling Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria By Dr Ankit Mahadevia Antibiotic resistance never should have become the public health crisis we are seeing today. As a society, we thought the problem of bacterial infections had been solved decades ago when more than 200 powerful antibiotics representing different classes such as beta-lactam, tetracyclines… Read More
Raising The Bar On The Biologics Potential Dr Michael Mouradian In the quest for safe, efficacious and profitable therapies, pharma research is changing. There is continued pressure to fill the drug pipeline and, at the same time, globalisation of personalised medicines is complex, expensive and requires a significant time commitment. Read More
Advancing the Drug Discovery Pipeline with Early Stage In Vitro ADME and Toxicity Testing By Dr Maureen Bunger With increasing pressures on pharmaceutical companies to develop new, effective therapeutics across the board, and keep the costs of development down, the drug discovery industry needs to ensure that its standard processes… Read More
Long-Read Sequencing Offers Path to More Accurate Drug Metabolism Profiles By Dr Jenny Ekholm In the complex drug discovery process, one of the looming questions for any new compound is how it will be metabolised in a human body. While there are several methods for evaluating this, one of the… Read More
UX Design - Maximising the Value of Scientific Software in Life Science R&D By Dr Jennifer A. Cham & Katrina Costa Using scientific software can be frustrating and time-consuming, resulting in less productive research. This article aims to demonstrate that User Experience (UX) Design - an evidence-based design process that… Read More
3D Cell Culture - A Rapidly Emerging Technique for Drug Discovery By Hannah Gitschier, Dr Ye Fang and Dr Richard M. Eglen The past decades have witnessed significant efforts toward the development of three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures. Today, 3D cell cultures are emerging not only as a new tool in… Read More
Monitoring the Balance Between Immune Repression and Stimulation in Cancer Immunotherapy By Dr Peter Schulz-Knappe and Dr Georg Lautscham Cancer is still one of the main causes of death worldwide, yet recent strides towards more effective treatments have been made in the form of new cancer immunotherapies. By weaponising the… Read More
A Marriage of Technologies for Immuno-Oncology In Vivo Studies By Dr Philip Dube Discovering and validating novel therapeutic targets to add to the immuno-oncology arsenal will require refined preclinical models that meet the needs for suitability, scalability and clinical relevancy throughout the various phases of target discovery and drug validation. Read More
Spheroids Rapidly Becoming a Preferred 3D Cell Culture Format By Dr John Comley There are many advantages associated with culturing cells in three-dimensional (3D) versus conventional two-dimensional (2D) tissue culture. Scaffold-free 3D cell culture systems that generate spheroids (and other similar multicellular aggregations) have proved useful as they offer an… Read More
The Discoverome - Creative Destruction of Barriers for Faster to Patient Medicines R&D By Chris Molloy Future medicines discovery begins and ends with patients. Its scope will no longer be limited by the walls of the lab and the moats of major pharma. It will be disease-led, highly collaborative and… Read More
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
