The quest for accurate target validation
Preview of the upcoming foreword in our April issue, written by Sheraz Gul, Vice President and Head of Biology at Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME, Hamburg, Germany...
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Articles
The promise of induced pluripotent stem cells for liver disease, toxicology and drug discovery
We discuss the steps required for differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into hepatocyte-like cells, and how long this process takes and the quality control measures needed...
Workshop Review: Cell-based Assays for Screening (December 2014)
Sheraz Gul, Head of Biology at Fraunhofer-IME SP, provides an in-depth review of the Cell-Based Assays for Screening workshop which took place in December 2014...
Meet the editorial board members who influenced the Spring 2015 issue
Editor Caroline Richards talks about the editorial board members who have influenced the content coming up in the latest issue of Drug Target Review, available in April 2015...
How next-generation sequencing came to be: a brief history
DNA sequencing technologies have come on leaps and bounds since the double-helical structure of DNA was first discovered in 1953 by genetics pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick. This discovery paved the way to the development, years later, of next generation sequencing (NGS), a high-throughput technology that enables scientists to…
Formation of nano- and micro-scale drug delivery systems using microfluidic technology
The recent developments in microfluidic technology have provided an effective microreactor platform for the production of a range of pharmaceutically related materials in both nano- and micro-scale. This can be attributed to the unique characteristics that microfluidic-based reactors offer in terms of controllability and uniformity of the material characteristics, compared…
Neutrons: homing in on more targeted drug delivery
Neutrons, electrically neutral particles found within the nucleus of the atom, are coming into their own in the exploration of new ways to get drugs to their targets. Neutron techniques are being used to investigate innovative new approaches to drug delivery that could increase the effectiveness of treatments, improve the…
Synthetic macrocyclic receptors as tools in drug delivery and drug discovery
Macrocyclic compounds (see Figure 1) have fascinated medicinal chemists for generations. The first ones which have been characterised are the naturally occurring cyclodextrins (CDs), cyclic oligomers of glucose, which can be obtained by bacterial synthesis from starch. Calixarenes (CXs) were among the first man-made macrocycles, followed by crown ethers (Pedersen,…
Antibody Discovery Technologies: the partnership between academia and biopharma in the therapeutic monoclonal antibody success story
The use of monoclonal antibodies and antibody-based molecules as therapeutics to treat patients suffering with severe disease has become a major success story. Due to the exquisite specificity with which they interact with their antigen and the fact that their large binding surface can intervene at sites and targets not…
The latest trends in lab robotics and automation
15 July 2014 | By BioStrata
For those that couldn’t attend, here is a summary of some of the interesting insights shared at ELRIG’s recent Robotics and Automation 2014 Conference.
Targeting the ubiquitin-proteasome system
The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) is a hierarchical enzymatic cascade that plays an essential role in a broad range of cellular pathways and is found in cytoplasmic and nuclear actions of all eukaryotic cells...
Heat shock proteins: A high content assay opportunity to measure cellular stress response
Heat shock proteins (HSPs) have been proposed as therapeutic targets for novel anticancer agents. However, candidates have thus far failed due to low tolerability, limiting their efficacy. This failure highlights our current inability to predict drug toxicity in patients, a Holy Grail in modern drug discovery. Paradoxically, the fundamental role…
Drug resistance mechanisms and target selection in disease treatment strategies
In November 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed for the first time the marketing of high-throughput DNA sequencing technology for diagnostic testing. It was a breakthrough year for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)...
The therapeutic potential of RNA directed epigenetic regulation of transcription
Developments over the past decade have demonstrated that non-coding RNAs can exert control of transcriptional gene expression. Recent advances in genome-wide studies have revealed an abundance of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in human cells, which are as numerous as protein-coding genes...
Drug Target Review – Issue #1 2014
9 May 2014 | By Guido Rasi, Professor Sir Mark Pepys, Kenji Schorpp et al.
We are delighted to welcome you to the inaugural issue of European Drug Target Review, a magazine focused on the changing landscape of the drug discovery industry...