3D Cellular Imaging - Advances and Considerations for High-Content Screening By O. Joseph Trask, Dr Daniel V. LaBarbera and Dr Kevin Quick Commercially available high-content imaging (HCI) systems, introduced in the 1990s, have provided the scientific community with a platform that offers a unique set of tools ideal for advancing… Read More
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… Read More
Breath Based Biomarker Detection & Breath Biopsy - Informing drug development and future treatment regimes By Billy Boyle and Dr Mike Murphy The recent approval of the first liquid biopsy test for the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) demonstrates how biomarker-based detection tools are becoming important components of… Read More
Ion Channels - Increasingly Enticing Targets For Drug Discovery by Dr Douglas Krafte and Deborah Erickson Drug discovery focused on ion-channel proteins began generating great value for pharmaceutical R&D programmes more than 30 years ago, giving rise to medicines still important in the pharmacopeia for treating human disease. Pfizer Inc’s… Read More
By Dr A Roy, Prof B Patwardhan and Dr R Chaguturu Modern drug discovery approaches take too long, are too expensive, have too many clinical failures and uncertain outcomes. There are many reasons for this unsustainable business model, but primarily, the approaches are not comprehensively holistic. Secondly, none of the… Read More
Epigenetic Modulators of Histone Methylation By Dr Michael Thomenius and William P. Janzen Drug Discovery Epigenetics is a term that refers to the durable and context-specific regulation of transcription processes. The majority of epigenetics involves a complex system of enzymes, binding proteins and accessory proteins that control access to the… Read More
Full Length Isoform Sequencing (Iso-Seq) Yields a More Comprehensive View of Gene Activity By Luke Hickey RNA-seq has revolutionised how scientists can interrogate gene expression. But after years of performing RNA-seq studies with short-read sequencers, many have realised that there is more to be discovered. Comprehensive transcriptome analysis – an… Read More
Microtissues For In Vitro Toxicity Assessment: Cost effective and in vivo relevant toxicology tools By Dr Stephanie Ravenscroft, Dr Caroline Bauch, Dr Laura Hinton and Dr Paul Walker Conventional two-dimensional (2D) cell models (adherent cells grown on cell culture plates or cells in suspension) are limited in their abilities to… Read More
The Coming Age Of Mass Spectrometry Imaging By Dr Peter J.H. Webborn and Dr Richard J.A. Goodwin Mapping complex drug distribution/retention in tissues, aligned with efficacy and safety biomarker localisation is now possible using label-free mass spectrometry imaging technologies. While there remain challenges to be overcome, these molecular imaging techniques… Read More
Synthetic Lethality and Anti Cancer Drug Discovery By Jonathan D Moore Classically-activated oncogene targets have been a mainstay of cancer drug discovery for the past 15 years, but the druggable targets in this category have been largely mined out. Future efforts to drug the cancer genome must take synthetic lethal… Read More
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… Read More
The Role Of Immunodeficient Animal Models In Advancing Immuno-Oncology Research By Dr Michael Seiler From inbred wild-type to more advanced genetically-engineered strains, mouse models enable researchers to gain important insights into the complex biological underpinnings of human cancer. Among those, spontaneous and genetically engineered immunodeficient strains can be administered in… Read More
Phenotypic Drug Discovery: Striving towards the highest level of biological relevance By Dr John Comley Phenotypic drug discovery (PDD) implies screening where the molecular mechanism of action is not assumed and does not require knowledge of the molecular target. As such phenotypic drug discovery is comparable to empirical screening, which… Read More
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,… Read More
New Developments in Single Cell Separation and Analysis Technologies By Dr John Comley Drug Discovery Recent advances of single cell technologies are facilitating the opportunity to discern biological insights within individual cells and providing a means to reveal previously hidden relationships between individual cells within a population. Single cell technologies… Read More
Individualised Systems Medicine: Next-Generation Precision Cancer Medicine and Drug Positioning By Tea Pemovska, Paaivi Östling, Caroline Heckman, Olli Kallioniemi and Krister Wennerberg A growing number of oncology drugs are currently clinically available and more than a thousand compounds are being developed for oncology indications. Thus, the challenge is to systematically… Read More
