The Importance of Heterocyclic Compounds in Anti-Cancer Drug Design By Simon Pearce Heterocycles are key structural components of many of the anti-cancer drugs available on the market today. Indeed, of the novel molecular anti-cancer agents approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2015, almost two-thirds contained heterocyclic rings… Read More
Raising The Bar On The Biologics Potential Dr Michael Mouradian In the quest for safe, efficacious and profitable therapies, pharma research is changing. There is continued pressure to fill the drug pipeline and, at the same time, globalisation of personalised medicines is complex, expensive and requires a… Read More
Advancing the Drug Discovery Pipeline with Early Stage In Vitro ADME and Toxicity Testing By Dr Maureen Bunger With increasing pressures on pharmaceutical companies to develop new, effective therapeutics across the board, and keep the costs of development down, the drug discovery industry needs to ensure that its… Read More
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… Read More
Pharma Derisking: Approaches to Reduce Liability to Major Metabolically-Driven Causes of Drug Attrition By Guy Webber Intelligent application of early in vitro testing can help mitigate major drug development risks. The pharmaceutical industry is inherently risky. To develop a molecule that has a desired,… Read More
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… Read More
Kinases and Drug Discovery: Protein Kinases as a Validated Drug Target By Professor Said A. Goueli The role of protein and lipid kinases in cellular physiology and normal and abnormal growth has been well appreciated and has been the focus of intensive research in both academic arenas and… Read More
A Strategic Vision For 21st Century Drug Discovery By Dr Wayne Bowen, Dr Giles Sanders, Dr Andreas Werdich, Dr Brian Warrington and Dr Elizabeth Farrant Delivering genuine therapeutic innovation is more challenging and complex than ever. Despite major scientific breakthroughs and technological advances leading to a greater… Read More
Automated Liquid Handler Vendor vs Third Party Plastic Company by Dr John Comley Competing for the disposable pipette tip business. Users of automated liquid handlers today invariably have a choice – obtain disposable pipette tips from the original instrument vendor or purchase a ‘compatible’ product from a third… Read More
Translational Chemical Biology: Gap assessment for advancing drug discovery, development and precision medicine By Dr Mukund Chorghade, Dr Michael Liebman, Dr Gerald Lushington, Dr Stephen Naylor and Dr Rathnam Chaguturu As yesterday’s lead molecule enters today’s clinical trial, the standard operating script seems to call for product developers… Read More
Filling The Drug Discovery Abyss – Novel Business Models to Push Through the Valley of Death By Dr Swati Prasad, Dr Charles McOsker, Professor Kathryn Chapman and Dr Michael Foley Over the past three years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency… Read More
Why Adopting AI is Essential for a Sustainable Pharma Industry By Professor Jackie Hunter Advancements in technology, and in particular, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionising the way that we live our lives. Up to now, we have used it to help us find the quickest… Read More
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… Read More
An Update on Hepatitis B Therapies By Dr John Sullivan-Bolyai The hepatitis B crisis is a worldwide unmet medical need. Hepatitis B (HBV) is the cause of a silent epidemic that has resulted in a worldwide healthcare crisis. Despite the significant burden it places on communities across the… Read More
I Robot. I, The Future – Robotics Within and Beyond The Lab Richard Holland The Pistoia Alliance (whose membership includes most of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies, technology vendors and publishers active in the life science R&D sector), is keenly interested in discovering the ways in which innovation… 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… Read More
