Collaborative eR&D By Richard ORourke In 2001 at the GlaxoSmithKline inaugural shareholder meeting, Chief Executive JP Garnier was clearly not happy with what he regarded as the productivity crisis within the industrys R&D function. He contrasted the consistent growth in investment in R&D with the unchanging output in terms of… Read More
SCAVENGER strategies in organic synthesis - Part Two By Professor Peter Wipf and Dr Claire M. Coleman Part 1 of this article discussed the fundamental principles of the use of scavenging techniques in combinatorial and organic synthesis. Part one of scavenger strategies is linked here. In this article, more recent… Read More
Functional cell-based high throughput drug screening By Professor Daniel T. Chiu and Professor Owe Orwar Cell-based assays are poised to assume an increasingly important role in drug screening and discovery. It is becoming apparent that simple binding assays and in vitro experiments are grossly insufficient for extrapolating the efficacy and… Read More
Making the Most of Drug Discovery Data By Dr Nick Davies and Dr Tim Peakman Discovery scientists in most pharmaceutical companies are struggling with incompatible legacy systems, a growing volume of data and the imminent advent of a product model that will demand much more of them. Data-driven drug discovery… Read More
Gene Expression: Analysis and Drug R&D By Dr Ralph Sinibaldi It is clear that gene expression profiling systems have a role to play in many facets of drug discovery and development, but several questions remain. We take a look at the use of DNA microarray for gene expression or expression… Read More
Drug Discovery Spending - A Year In Review By Isaac Meek Drug In 2003, the research products market reported revenues of $23 billion, with a 7.5% growth rate over 2002. Although there are many consumers in this market, by far the greatest are drug discovery research groups. In recent history,… Read More
Using RNAi to identify and validate novel drug targets: targeting human kinases with an siRNA library By Andrea Kroenke, Anne Grabner, Dr Michael Hannus, Dr Christoph Sachse, Dr David Dorris and Dr Christophe Echeverri Libraries of siRNAs directed against predefined subsets of genes now offer the capacity to greatly accelerate… Read More
Role of image informatics in accelerating drug discovery and development By Robert Dunkle There is a new category of informatics that is proving itself essential to the acceleration of drug discovery and development. Image informatics is the systematic use of image data as a means to help interpret experiments and… Read More
Protease Inhibitor Therapeutics for Respiratory Disease By Dr Philip J. Barr Disruption of the natural equilibria between proteases and their cognate inhibitors is a common feature of inflammatory disease. When this occurs in the lung, the effects can lead to irreversible impairment of pulmonary function. Although protease inhibition has been… Read More
New Flash Imagers: Facilitating higher throughput functional GPCR assays By Dr John Comley The recent availability of tailored automation solutions that combine liquid handling at the reading position with the latest innovations in low light imaging technology are providing screeners with new tools for the measurement of high throughput flash… Read More
Accommodating cells in HTS By Sandra Fox High Throughput Screening has become an important and integrated part of drug discovery at most pharmaceutical and many biotechnology companies worldwide, and is now entrenched in the drug discovery process. To produce high quality leads, centralised HTS laboratories are expanding their overall role… Read More
SCAVENGER strategies in organic synthesis - Part One By Professor Peter Wipf and Dr Claire M. Coleman Over the past 20 years combinatorial chemistry has proved to be an important tool for the generation of large numbers of compounds required for drug discovery programmes. This two-part article covers the history… Read More
Fewer drugs approved, more money spent - Where's the beef? By G. Steven Burrill Three years ago, when biotech was at its Wall Street heights, personalised medicine and its promise were on everyone's lips. Billions of dollars were being put to work to make targeted medicine a reality... and genomics… Read More
By Tim Ward Cell culture is and has historically been an essential component of the drug discovery toolbox. Cell culture provides the proteins, membrane preparations and other raw materials required for biological research. In recent years, with the emergence of high-throughput screening technology and binding and live, cell-based functional assays,… Read More
Recent advances in mass spectrometry for drug discovery and development By Dr Nelson Cooke Of the numerous types of analytical techniques used in drug discovery and development, mass spectrometry (MS) has become one of the most powerful tools for the analyses of a wide range of chemical and biological entities. Read More
PATCHERS vs SCREENERS: divergent opinion on high throughput electro-physiology By Dr John Comley The prospect of enabling higher throughput electro-physiology (patch-clamping) has created much expectation from scientists within the ion channel community. Yet there are opposing views among traditional electro-physiologists and screeners as to the needed specification and the preferred… Read More
