Orphan drugs

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 […]

Personalised Medicine: What’s in it for big pharma? By Dr Stephen Little There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has far enemies all those who have […]

Radiosynthesis – A vital role supporting drug development? By Dave Roberts and Professor Bill Lockley The key in vivo drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies continue to be undertaken using radiolabelled versions of drug molecules. Traditionally, the preparation of these isotopically labelled compounds was largely the domain of specialist internal radiochemistry groups within large pharmaceutical companies […]

Biotechnology-based Orphan Drugs – Achievements and challenges By Dr Erik Tambuyzer For many patients suffering from rare diseases, there are simply no medicines available to treat their condition. With an estimated 20-30 million such patients in Europe alone, rare diseases collectively represent a significant unmet medical need. Individual disease groups, however, may have few sufferers […]

High Throughput Screening using G-protein coupled receptors as the target plate-based and biochromatographic technologies By Professor Irving W.Wainer, Dr Farideh Beigi and Dr Ruin Moaddel The G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) family constitutes the largest class of cell surface receptors and GPCRs are the targets for more than 50% of the marketed drugs. The therapeutic importance […]