Microfluidics

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 early drug discovery, but also […]

A Strategic Vision For 21st Century Drug Discovery By Dr Wayne Bowen, Dr Giles Sanders, Dr Andreas Werdich, Dr Brian Warrington and Dr Elizabeth Farrant Delivering genuine therapeutic innovation is more challenging and complex than ever. Despite major scientific breakthroughs and technological advances leading to a greater understanding of the aetiology of diseases, it is […]

Automated Liquid Handler Vendor vs Third Party Plastic Company by Dr John Comley Competing for the disposable pipette tip business. Users of automated liquid handlers today invariably have a choice – obtain disposable pipette tips from the original instrument vendor or purchase a ‘compatible’ product from a third party plastics manufacturer or lab supplier. Increasingly, […]

3D Cellular Imaging – Advances and Considerations for High-Content Screening By O. Joseph Trask, Dr Daniel V. LaBarbera and Dr Kevin Quick Commercially available high-content imaging (HCI) systems, introduced in the 1990s, have provided the scientific community with a platform that offers a unique set of tools ideal for advancing high-throughput biological discoveries and therapeutic […]

I Robot. I, The Future – Robotics Within and Beyond The Lab Richard Holland The Pistoia Alliance (whose membership includes most of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies, technology vendors and publishers active in the life science R&D sector), is keenly interested in discovering the ways in which innovation through pre-competitive collaboration can be used to […]

Preclinical Imaging: Improving Translational Power In Oncology By Dr Todd Sasser Imaging has long been indispensable in clinical practice, and researchers have for many years used the same toolbox of imaging modalities as a component of their preclinical and drug development work. Imaging continues to provide crucial datasets to scientists in neurology, cardiology and metabolic […]

Epigenetic Targets: On the verge of becoming a major new category for successful drug research By Dr John Comley Most vendors of epigenetic modification proteins and reagents have enhanced and broadened their offerings in recent years. Of particular note is the increasing range of proteins and binding assays that now support research on the Bromodomains […]

Automated Patch Clamping Finally Achieves High Throughput By Dr John Comley Two new third-generation automated patch clamp (APC) systems capable of high throughput processing (10,000 data points per eight-hour day) and full robotic integration have been recently launched. The resulting wider choice of primarily 384 APC systems has the potential to intensify competition in the […]

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 […]

Preventing Pandemics By Dr Nathaniel Hentz Over the years, influenza has taken the lives of millions. While vaccines are helping to reduce the damage caused by the virus, there is still a major capacity shortfall. Could access to US and European expertise and quality training improve capacity and prevent the next pandemic? When new and […]

Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assays (ELISA): Recent Innovations Take Analyte Detection To New Levels By Dr John Comley Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) have been around as one of the primary methods of analyte detection for more than four decades. Over the years many changes to the basic format have resulted in assay improvements, but some of the […]

Pharmaceutical & biomedical research likely to use $1 billion worth of microfluidics devices by 2016 By Frédéric Breussin The proliferation of lower cost genomics tools, and the maturing of microfluidics lab equipment into more robust tools that better interface with established research flows, could drive microfluidics devices for pharmaceutical and biomedical research to close to […]

DNA Diagnostics Gets Digitised – Quantitative real-time PCR By Dr Mikael Kubista and Dr Anders Stahlberg Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) has during the last two decades emerged as the preferred technology for nucleic acid analysis in routine as well as in research. qPCR has the sensitivity to detect a single molecule, the specificity to differentiate […]

8 Years of Surveying Ion Channel Screening – Has anything changed? By Dr John Comley No review of ion channel screening over the past decade can avoid discussing the pivotal role played by automated electrophysiology. Arguably this technology, more than any other, has opened up the field to wider investigation, made ion channels more accessible […]

Dr Wilma Keighley Generally kinetics are only investigated late in a programme by which time many compounds, slightly less potent but with a much better kinetic profile, have already been discarded. This paper argues that having kinetic information at the early stages of drug discovery can bring numerous benefits to the process. The majority of […]

Next Generation Flow Chemistry and Biology Platforms: The Impact on Small Molecule Drug Discovery By Dr J Mark Treherne, Dr David M Parry and Christopher N Selway Can the next generation of flow chemistry and biology platforms be fully integrated to transform the efficiency of small-molecule drug discovery for pharmaceutical industry? There have been many […]