Translational chemistry

Secondary Screening Workstations – The emergence of compact turnkey solutions that work By Dr John Comley With the launch of new workstations focused on secondary screening applications not only are we witnessing the shrinkage of laboratory automation but we are seeing the emergence of true walk-away solutions, ie set up the system, press start and […]

Protein Arrays for Assessment of Target Selectivity By Professor Ian Humphery-Smith, Dr Erik Wischerhoff and Dr Ryuji Hashimoto Transforming knowledge of the human genome into a lead optimisation tool. Genomics activity has been criticised for having elucidated a plethora of potentially interesting drug targets, each awaiting further validation, but having not yet revolutionised the pharmaceutical […]

Predictive chemoinformatics applications to the pharmaceutical industry By Dr Leslie J. Browne and Laurie L.Taylor While significant advances in chemoinformatics present tremendous opportunities to improve human health, the future of chemoinformatics in the pharmaceutical industry is not without significant challenges. Chemoinformatics is the result of collective advances in chemistry, biology, computer sciences and statistics and […]

Proteomics In Drug Target Discovery – High-throughput meets high-efficiency By Dr Terence E. Ryan and Dr Scott D. Patterson Biochemistry is enjoying a renaissance under the guise of ‘proteomics’ due to the availability of sequenced genomes, advances in mass spectrometry and associated data analysis. Its application to drug discovery and development has obvious benefits to […]

Protein Arrays – New technology for the proteomics era By Dr Jeffrey P. Kiplinger The study of the human proteome will drive drug discovery in coming years; although how, when, and in what direction are a little uncertain at present. To build understanding of the role of the human protein complement in health, development, and […]

Protein Therapeutics – New ladders up the fruit tree By Dr Richard AG Smith Therapeutic proteins are often regarded as too technologically demanding, too costly, too restricted in routes or duration of administration or – in an era of massive opportunity provided by high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry and genomics – simply passe. This article […]

The Integration Abyss By Dr Scott D. Kahn The long-standing disconnect between target discovery/characterisation and compound discovery is a major challenge facing the pharmaceutical industry in its quest to develop innovative therapies from the wealth of information flowing from the human genome. There is enormous interest within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry to better utilise […]

The Industrialisation of Bioinformatics By Dr Alex Titomirov With the completion of the ‘draft’ sequence of the human genome predicting an estimate of 40,000-120,000 genes that describe us, the real work begins. The problem now is not lack of data but lack of tools to thoroughly analyse what we already have and what’s coming in […]

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 research and the application of […]

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 sensitivity, high throughput mass spectrometric […]