Himarnessing fragment-based drug discovery at CRT By Dr Andrew P Turnbull and Dr Martin E Swarbrick In the past decade, fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) has gained increasing popularity in the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful alternative and complement to traditional high-throughput screening (HTS) as a source of preliminary hits for… Read More
By Dr Susanta K. Sarkar The current challenges facing drug discovery and development in terms of attrition are well documented. This article discusses how molecular imaging approaches from bench to bedside can not only streamline drug development, but also open up new opportunities in the treatment management of targeted therapies. Read More
Automation Of Solid/Powder Dispensing: Much needed, but cautiously used! By Dr John Comley This article investigates solid/powder dispensing in pharma and biotech, examines where it is most used, whether there exists a need to apply automation and what is motivating its wider use today. It reveals how concerns over problematic… Read More
Overcoming the Limitations of Chemical Structure By Dr Andy Vinter, Dr Steve Gardner and Dr Sally Rose The pharmaceutical business has been profoundly hampered by a ubiquitous and unexpected obstacles; the way it draws its chemical compounds. Scientists, patent agents and business decision makers from R&D, safety, and in-licensing are… Read More
Recent Technology Advances Transforming Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery and Development By Dr Coiln Brenan, and Dr Bill LaMarr The last decade has seen rapid technological progress but with increasing demands for safe and efficacious drugs, technological solutions that reduce the barriers to clinical success will be of more interest than those… Read More
Restructuring Proteomics to Enable Personalised Cancer Care By Dr Henry Rodriguez The genomics community has made great strides in our understanding of the molecular basis of cancer and these advances are slowly beginning to change the way we diagnose and treat patients. But genomic studies alone cannot capture the complete… Read More
Generation II DNA Sequencing Technologies By Dr Stephen F. Kingsmore, Dr Jenny C. van Velkinburgh, Dr Joann Mudge, and Dr Gregory D. May Generation II DNA sequencing has been widely heralded as a disruptive technology, generating tens of millions of random short sequences at efficiencies up to 20,000-fold greater than… Read More
Stem Cell Applications and Opportunities in Drug Discovery By Dr Mark A. Thiede The high attrition rate of late stage drug candidates has led the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to a reassess the in vitro models used to select and validate drug targets and subsequent lead molecules. Traditional cell lines… Read More
High Throughput Screening, High Content Screening, Primary and Stem Cells By Dr Richard M. Eglen Over the past decade, the use of cell-based assays has accelerated in modern drug discovery. Indeed, the majority of assays in either target validation or lead identification/optimisation all now employ cell-based technologies. Furthermore, a wide… Read More
Building a Robust Portfolio of New Medicines to Combat Malaria By Dr Timothy N.C. Wells Malaria is one of the biggest killers of our time. Current estimates from the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggest that more than 250 million people are at risk worldwide. More significantly, almost a million people… Read More
Natural Product Pharmaceuticals - The third generation By Dr Melanie McCullagh Compounds derived from natural products have made a big impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Of the 1,010 NCEs approved between January 1981 and June 2006, 43 were unaltered natural products (NPs) and a further 232 (23%) were second generation… Read More
High Content Screening - The next challenge: effective data mining and exploration By Dr Kurt Zingler and Dr Stephan Heyse The use of high content screening within HTS is growing and with many past hurdles now overcome, the need for effective tools for data analysis is becoming paramount. Over the… Read More
qPCR Assays - End user practices and latest vendor offerings By Dr John Comley This review provides an insight into real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays today. Using end-user feedback it investigates interest in the targets for qPCR applications; primary application areas for qPCR analyses; the importance of emerging applications; how… Read More
Treating Rheumatoid Arthritis with Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs (DMARDs) and Biologics By Dr William E. Fogler Successful treatment paradigms for newly diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis (RA) now rely on aggressive pharmacotherapy approaches with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). Despite risks of toxicity and adverse effects, combination strategies with DMARDs are finding greater clinical… Read More
High Throughput Screening in Academia - Drug discovery initiatives at the University of Kansas By Dr P McDonald, Dr Roy, Byron Taylor, Ashleigh Price, Dr Sittampalam, Dr Scott Weir, Dr Chaguturu Academia has historically been involved in exploring the fundamental aspects of the disease targets and in developing tool molecules… Read More
Next Generation Immunoassay Systems and the Revival of Protein Biomarkers By Dr John Todd and Dr Sara J. Agee Proteins are the machinery that drive most biological processes; however, measuring their concentrations at low levels has been historically impeded by a lack of appropriately sensitive technology. Advances in immunoassay technology,… Read More
