By Dr William Olds and Dr Deepa Shankar While the antibody market has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry enabling the discovery of cures, disease diagnosis and basic science acceleration, this has allowed low quality antibodies to hit the market. With a large crisis in reproducibility, the need for high quality… Read More
Innovative glycan imaging methods drive cancer biomarker discovery By Dr Richard Drake, Dr Anand Mehta and Dr Peggy Angel Volume 21 Issue 2 - Spring 2020 Glycosylation accounts for the majority of post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins, and changes in glycosylation are known to play a key role in disease… Read More
Target discovery and drug development what comes after CRISPR? By Benedict CS Cross Volume 21 Issue 2 - Spring 2020 For an area of research as important and impactful as drug discovery, it is surprising how often efforts in this field are directed by short-term trends. We have seen an… Read More
Mologic has announced that it has launched an accelerated programme with the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, Senegal to develop a low-cost, high-performance rapid diagnostic test for Ebola Virus Disease (Ebola). The project is supported by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Government’s Department for International Development… Read More
Harnessing the modified proteome for increased diagnostic power By Dr David Bramwell, Dr Steven Laval and Dr Jane McLeod Relevant biomarkers are vitally important in personalised medicine, guiding patient matching to specific therapies for earlier, easier and more effective disease identification and treatment. Here we trace the expectations of ’omicsbased… Read More
Getting a handle on liquids: automation solutions for drug discovery By Helen Stewart-Miller and Thomas Hope The accurate and precise measurement of liquids and the transport of exact volumes between vessels, or from one instrument to another, are processes that constitute the very essence of research. However, while this simple… Read More
Using Live-Cell Imaging Systems to Transform Perspectives in Drug Discovery By Helen Stewart-Miller and Dr Kate Tointon Live-cell imaging has transformed the study of cell behaviour and function. The technique allows researchers to monitor internal cell structures, interactions and processes in real-time, and over time. In drug discovery, understanding the… Read More
Reducing the PAINS in High Throughput Screening: Assay design as a tool for maximising efficiency By Dr Philip S. Jones and Dr Stuart P. McElroy While the quality of the compound collection is frequently described as a key determinant of the success of a high throughput screening campaign, in our… Read More
How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Drug Design By Dr Mark Roberts and Dr Sam Genway AI could create a streamlined, automated approach to drug discovery, trawling vast datasets to identify targets, find candidate molecules and predict synthesis routes. Getting there will require significant vision, but we are already seeing exciting… Read More
By Dr Alexander C. Maue It has become quite evident that the microbiome has the potential to impact drug discovery in vital ways. In addition to impacting study reproducibility and variability, the microbiome may influence drug efficacy or serve as a therapeutic agent. To capitalise on the microbiome’s potential to… Read More
Fail Early, Fail Fast - A phenotypic rescue approach By Dr Anne-Marie Zuurmond, et al. New disease targets frequently emerge in literature, but the thorough target validation required to consider these targets for a drug discovery programme is often lacking. In pharmacological or genetic perturbation studies using complex biological assays,… Read More
Automating Automation - How close are we to Artificial Intelligence impact? By Dr Michael A. Tarselli, Dr Yohann Potier and Dr Alan E. Fletcher In terms of consistency, repeatability, known errors and sheer volume, there exists perhaps no better collection of data for computer learning than that emerging from automated… Read More
Flow Cytometry - The advanced systems overcoming drug discovery pain points By Helen Stewart-Miller and Dr Richard Massey Flow cytometry is an invaluable technique for the characterisation of highly heterogeneous cell populations. Thanks to improvements in throughput, automation and multichannel detection capabilities, recent years have seen its use expand across… Read More
From Genotype to Phenotype: Leveraging functional genomics in oncology By Dr Menelas Pangalos & Steve Rees et al. A challenge in drug discovery is that, at best, only around one in five drug candidates will lead to the launch of a medicine. In 2011, AstraZeneca initiated a strategic ‘5R Framework’… Read More
3D Organoid Cell Culture - Optimising disease models for research and drug discovery By Dr Amanda Linkous, Hilary Sherman, Iris Li and Dr Richard M. Eglen The use of human-induced pluripotent stem cells (HiPSCs) continues to grow in three-dimensional (3D) spheroid and organoid culture. Although advances in 3D cell culture… Read More
Systems Pharmacology: When multi-targeting is advantageous By Dr Kirkwood A. Pritchard Jr, Dr Dustin P. Martin and Dr Stephen Naylor The safety and efficacy of therapeutic drugs still requires improvement. In part this is due to the promiscuity of individual drugs, which on average can interact with an estimated 6-28… Read More
