Regenerative Medicine

Cell Therapy – Preserving Cell Integrity and Viability To Drive Discovery Mary Kay Bates Cell therapy is poised to play a pivotal role in the development of precision and personalised medicines that will transform healthcare for millions of patients worldwide. Involving the direct use of whole cells or cellular material in patients, cell therapy is […]

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 […]

Spheroids Rapidly Becoming a Preferred 3D Cell Culture Format By Dr John Comley There are many advantages associated with culturing cells in three-dimensional (3D) versus conventional two-dimensional (2D) tissue culture. Scaffold-free 3D cell culture systems that generate spheroids (and other similar multicellular aggregations) have proved useful as they offer an easy route to access 3D […]

CRISPR Cas9: Transforming Gene Editing in Drug Discovery Labs By Dr John Comley It is evident from a recent market survey on gene editing in drug discovery that CRISPR/Cas9 is now recognised as the superlative method when attempting a gene knockout or when introducing defined mutations, insertions or modifications to the genome. Although use of […]

Cell Therapy & Gene Therapy – The emerging fourth pillar of healthcare systems By Keith Thompson As the CEO of an organisation that deals exclusively in cell therapy and gene therapy, it is no surprise that I would champion the emergence of these products as the fourth pillar of medicine alongside small molecules, biologics and […]

  by Dr John Comley The case for using more physiologically-relevant cells for modelling disease pathophysiology, for understanding a drug’s mechanism of action, in toxicology/safety testing and in phenotypic drug screening assays is now well accepted. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are seen as a resource from which to differentiate unlimited quantities of almost […]

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicines Human iPSC Initiative By Dr Thomas J. Novak This article discusses large-scale generation of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to accelerate the understanding of disease biology and drug discovery. In 2012, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced its Human iPSC Initiative, an ambitious effort to generate […]

mRNA Will Revolutionise the Biopharmaceutical Industry By Dr Ingmar Hoerr Messenger RNA (mRNA) – the naturally occurring molecule honed over thousands of years of evolution to translate accurately and efficiently the information encoded in a cell’s DNA into the proteins essential for maintaining cell function and ensuring an organism’s survival, will revolutionise the biopharmaceutical industry. […]

By Dr Scott R. Burger, Louis Juliano, and Dr Wenshi Wang For more than two decades, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries have been working to unlock the great potential of cell therapy, which uses products composed of living, functional cells to mediate the therapeutic effect. These novel biologics have potential applications in disorders estimated to […]

How Digital Innovation and Collaboration Is Driving a Global Demand for Effective Reporting in Research Funding By Frances Buck The UK, Europe and the United States are world leaders in research and innovation, with their researchers making vast contributions to global knowledge. They have world-leading universities, research institutes and scientific enterprises, supported by a public […]

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 changed? By far the biggest […]

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 elsewhere. But the declining productivity […]

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 cell biology. Leveraging experience with […]

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 stem cells valuable for both […]

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 structures to rapidly sequencing and […]

Stem Cells Rapidly Gaining Traction in Research and Drug Discovery By Dr John Comley A recent market survey on stem cells in research and drug discovery showed that despite a significant amount of hype and hope around stem cells, most drug discovery-related efforts today still fall into the category of basic research and the majority […]