By Dr John Comley 3D cell culture has the potential to deliver higher quality culture information that is more representative of tissue morphology and predictive of drug responses in vivo. Three years ago we concluded in DDW that 3D cell culture was still open to major improvements, so what has… Read More
More Than Genes and Cells: Drug Discovery in the Extracellular Matrix (ECM) By Dr William Bains Drug discovery in the last few decades has focused on the cellular and genetic mechanisms of disease. This has been very successful in cancer, which is a disease of somatic genetics, and moderately successful… Read More
Stem Cell Banking In Support of Drug Discovery By Dr Thomas J Novak, Dr Uta Grieshammer, Dr Michael Yaffe and Dr Steve Madore The discovery by Yamanaka and Thomson in 2007 that human somatic cells can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state (ie, induced pluripotent stem cells, iPSCs) has revolutionised… Read More
Large-Scale Expansion of Stem Cells For Therapy and Screening By Dr Y. John Shyu, Dr Katherine E. Strathearn and Dr Richard M. Eglen Recently, pre-clinical and clinical studies of stem cells in regenerative medicine have demonstrated great promise as treatments for various diseases. Their ability to self-renew and differentiate makes… Read More
Exploring The Feasibility of Human Antimicrobial Peptides For New and More Efficient Antibiotics By Dr Max Ryadnov To help combat decades of stagnation in antibiotic development, a team led by the National Physical Laboratory conducted two studies into the antimicrobial peptides that fight infection in our bodies and the feasibility… Read More
The Drug Repositioning Revolution: Rescuing & Repurposing Drugs By Dr Monika Green and Dr Kate Hudson-Farmer Cost containment and improving ways of treating people are key drivers for healthcare systems. Unfortunately, these do not often go hand in hand. Finding novel therapeutics with enhanced efficacy is both time consuming and… Read More
Informatics & Data: Revolutionising the R&D Arena By Glyn Williams and Dr Paul Denny-Gouldson Today’s information technologies profoundly affect the way we conduct research and development (R&D), and the last 20 years have seen great advances in information technology across both our work and home lives. From representing complex material… 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
Automated Compound Management Evolves To Meet The Drug Discovery Demands Of The Future By Dr Caroline Engeloch and Dr Daniel Baeschlin The development of new drugs involves testing hundreds of thousands of compounds, from high throughput screening through to subsequent lead optimization. Recognizing the importance of a compound bank in… 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
Fluorescence Lifetime Assays By Dr Graham Cotton, Dr Wayne Bowen, Dr Robert Grundy and Dr Ulrich Hassiepen The benefits of fluorescence lifetime-based technologies (FLT) have been highlighted for more than a decade but thus far they have failed to gain widespread acceptance. Significant improvements in assay reagents and availability of… 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
Partnering with the right CRO is a winning strategy for companies big and small By Dr Davide Molho The Bio-Pharma business model is undergoing radical changes. Over the last two decades, we have seen the biopharmaceutical industry gradually become more willing to look externally and embrace the concept of outsourcing… Read More
Highlights from GlobalData’s CRO Benchmark Report By Adam M. Dion The biopharmaceutical industry is currently facing significant headwinds. The blockbuster era is over, development costs are skyrocketing, uncertainty exists around regulatory and reimbursement, patent cliffs, generic erosion and a sluggish global economy all have industry executives losing sleep at night. 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
