Stem Cells - The long march forward to the clinic By Dr Alan Colman The area of cellular therapeutics has never been readily embraced by 'Big Pharma', with ethical and regulatory issues even more complex and troublesome than proteins. Can stem cell therapy provide the key to unlocking a rich… Read More
Outsourcing life science informatics solutions By Dr Steve Gardner The life science industry depends on information gathered from new technologies for productivity and competitive advantage in the R&D process. As more information is gathered and the systems become more complex, building and maintaining data management solutions that support rapid and… Read More
Biologically Relevant Chemistry By Dr Stephen A. Hill A large proportion of R&D expenditure relates to the investigation of compounds which ultimately fail to reach the market as useful medicines. We discuss why early drug discovery - using high throughput, automated in vitro and in silico methods, must become the… Read More
Pharmaceutical Industry R&D Partnering Strategies By Riccardo Pigliucci Drug Discovery With a sustained rate of more than 250 R&D partnering deals each year many valuable lessons are being learned. Although there is no exact 'formula for success' there are many 'success factors' that can be utilised to reduce the risk… Read More
Increasing the chances of lead discovery By Sandra Fox, MBA, Dr Helen Wang, Dr Lynne Sopchak and Dr Richard Khoury For HTS laboratories worldwide, the mission is to supply therapeutic groups in the shortest time possible with high quality hits and leads that will become drug candidates. Mounting pressure to… Read More
High Throughput Screening (HTS) - Where next? By Dr Mark Beggs After approximately a decade of maturation and a three orders of magnitude increase in capabilities, High Throughput Screening (HTS) is now an established discipline within pharmaceutical discovery. But opposing stresses exist within the screening world; the resolution of which… Read More
Discovery Research in the Co-Genomic Era - Biology goes industrial By Dr Timothy Wells and Dr Georg Feger The parallel between the search for gold in the last century and drug discovery in the co-genome era is very clear. As with all gold rushes the rewards will go to the… Read More
High-throughput Crystallisation By Dr Sara Moran and Dr Lance Stewart With structure-based drug design on the increase can the development of high-throughput crystallisation fulfil its promise to revolutionise the drug discovery process? In an era when the development of drugs is hindered by the exorbitant costs of discovery and clinical… Read More
By Dr David C. U’Prichard It is almost axiomatic that the pharmaceutical R&D industry has not achieved in the last decade an increase in productivity (measured as high value NCEs) commensurate with the explosion of new biological information, chemistry techniques and information storage/retrieval/examination systems, let alone the real increase in… Read More
By Dr Ashok R. Dongre and Dr Stanley A. Hefta The genomic sequencing efforts spawned the field of proteomics by providing the basic blueprint for protein sequences, enabling proteomics to become the contemporary technology for studying the underlying mechanisms of disease. This review will address the technologies related to proteomic… Read More
Recent Developments in Combinatorial Chemistry By Dr Anthony D Baxter Combinatorial chemistry has advanced significantly from the early 1990s when it was a new science of mainly conceptual interest to today where it has evolved into a key component of the drug discovery industry. The needs of the Pharma industry… Read More
By Matthias Mann, Protein Interaction Laboratory (PIL), University of Southern Denmark Affinity proteomic methods can translate genomic data into validated targets for drug discovery. Baits such as tagged gene product or small molecules obtained from cell-based assays are used to purify interacting proteins. These proteins are then identified by high… Read More
