Orphan drugs

High Throughput Flow Cytometry for Discovery at UNMCMD and the NIH Molecular Libraries Initiative By Dr Larry A. Sklar and Dr Bruce S. Edwards Commercial flow cytometers became widely established in research and clinical laboratories in the 1980s. Once the domain of immunologists and hematologists for cell sorting and analysis, the need for sample handling […]

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 […]

Progress in the Implementation of Label-Free Detection – Cell-based assays By Dr John Comley Progress made in the use of impedance and optical grating technologies for label-free detection of cell-based assays where examined in HTStec’s recent Cell-Based Label-Free Detection Trends report. Uniquely all of these label-free offerings are plate-based and are amenable to moderate throughput. […]

Is Amyloid-related Toxicity an Inevitable Consequence of Ageing? By Dr J Mark Treherne and Dr David IC Scopes Amyloid-related toxicity need not necessarily be the inevitable consequence of ageing, if some of the new drug discovery strategies to treat neurodegenerative and other ageing-related diseases succeed in the clinic. An increasing number of companies are now […]

William Downey and Dr Shauna Farr-Jones GPCRs are the most studied drug target class and have a proven record as valuable drug targets, with 40-50% of marketed drugs being modulators of GPCR function. Despite the intense effort focused on these targets by the pharmaceutical industry over many years, numerous challenges remain. Evolving technologies for GPCRs […]

Personalised Medicine – Technological innovation and patient empowerment or exuberant hyperbole? By Adam W. Culbertson, Dr Stephen J. Valentine and Dr Stephen Naylor The current paradigm of modern healthcare focuses on patient symptoms, subsequent diagnosis and corresponding treatment of the specific disease(s). Escalating healthcare costs and a trial and error approach to diagnosing and treating […]

Emerging concepts of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) function and drug discovery By Dr Richard M. Eglen, Dr Roger Bosse and Dr Graham S. Long G protein-coupled cell surface receptors (GPCRs) have served a fundamental role in modern pharmacology, due to their central importance in cell communication, and have been the target for the discovery of […]

Confocal vs Widefield High Content Imaging By Dr John Comley A variety of new confocal hardware and software solutions have recently become available to support high content imaging. Most of the solutions have in common the potential of rejecting out-of-focus background fluorescence and of improving the signal to noise of images. Yet awareness and understanding […]

By Dr Alpheus Bingham It has been suggested that the blockbuster business model, which has been the key to big pharma success, is now broken and completely beyond repair. In a truly global and fast changing business world, is it time to examine alternatives to the classic monolithic risk structure and evolve into the ‘next […]

By Dr George G. Harrigan The potential of metabolomics, a systems approach to biochemical pathway analysis, to yield scientific and commercial benefits to healthcare and biotechnology enterprises is increasingly recognised. This article discusses current applications and future developments and places an emphasis on incorporation of metabolomics within all aspects of the value chain of drug […]