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Progressing drug discovery projects to a stage that attracts commercial interest is a challenging endeavour, evidenced by the fact that only a small proportion of drug discovery projects are successfully progressed to such a stage. A major cause of this is the lack of comprehensive profiling of compounds prior to…
For the past thirty years, native mass spectrometry has grown in both scope and reach in labs across the globe to encompass larger and more challenging molecular complexes. However, up until now, the throughput of these techniques has been slow and manual. Christopher Nortcliffe discusses ways that native analysis is…
Conventional methods for radiolabelling proteins are time consuming and difficult to automate. In this article, Jason P. Holland discusses how combining photochemistry with radiochemistry enables development of radiolabelled proteins far more quickly and easily – literally in a flash of light.
The advent of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, together with the plummeting cost of whole-genome sequencing, has cleared a path for the development of customised cancer cell models. Here, we discuss recent developments in the field and challenges associated with targeted-therapy resistance.
High-content screening (HCS) approaches have become increasingly common in drug discovery with HCS technologies integrated across the drug discovery pipeline. Here we discuss recent developments in this arena.
This in-depth focus discusses screening and the uses of phenotypic profiling in drug discovery. Also examined is the role that CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and native mass spectrometry play.
In this in-depth focus, the challenges of imaging are explored including how to develop high-resolution images. Also discussed are new imaging technologies to aid drug discovery.
Image-based phenotypic profiling of small molecules has been used for identification and characterisation of small molecules in drug discovery and can provide important insights into their mechanisms of action (MOA). This article discusses the use of phenotypic profiling in drug discovery and how machine-learning algorithms could help improve objectivity, processing…
This in-depth focus looks at the modification of stem cells to facilitate their efficient delivery to tumours, highlighting the new development of pluripotent stem cells.
In this issue: novel approaches to produce radiolabelled antibodies, the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to accelerate the development of targeted therapies and utilisation of stem cells to study the effects of cannabis on neuronal development.
Typically, early drug discovery campaigns start with the screening of chemical libraries to identify candidate chemotypes modulating a particular target and/or phenotype. Success of the primary screening depends on multiple factors related to both biology and chemistry. These include the target’s druggability, sensitivity and specificity of assay system, composition and…
By the 1890s William B. Coley had injected streptococcal organisms in patients with solid tumours (“Coley’s Toxins”) to activate the immune system. Coley (1862-1936) was an American bone surgeon and pioneer of cancer immunotherapy. He was convinced that post-surgical infections had helped patients to recover better from their cancer by…
Today we are beginning to realise that lipids have been inadequately represented in biological and medical research. For decades, studies in the fields of DNA and proteins have been pushed but despite these adverse conditions, lipid research has made pioneering discoveries over the course of the last seven years. These…
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a painful and debilitating disease of articular joints.1,2 Its clinical prevalence is as high as 21.6 percent of the population in the United States,3 which constitutes direct health costs of over 80 billion US dollars annually.4
Automation offers a choice of powerful ways to design and execute high-quality laboratory research. The use of lab automation is now pervasive in biomedical labs, offering versatile platforms on which to perform an ever‑expanding array of tasks free of human errors, and a unique means to address the problems associated…
