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Industry Focus 2009
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
TATAA Biocenters, located in Gothenburg, Sweden, Prague, Czech Republic, Freising outside Münich in Germany, and Sunnyvale, California1, work with leading instrument manufacturers and reagents companies in the quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) field on new applications, making the know-how available through hands-on courses worldwide. Every year new courses are launched based on the most recent developments in the field. The year 2008 has been very active in the qPCR area, with several important advancements that provide solid ground for future development of new research and diagnostic tools. (more…)
Tagged with: Genomics, Mikael Kubista
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
When talking about stem cell research and its contribution to medical innovation, distinction should be made between embryonic stem cell research, believed to have almost infinite potential but with quite long-term perspectives, and adult stem cell research, which is already offering new therapeutic applications for otherwise incurable diseases. Today, adult stem cell-based therapies are in clinical development for a wide range of disorders1, and this field has indeed great potential to fill the gap in the market and help a large patient population with otherwise untreatable diseases. This is also generating an evolution in the regulatory framework2, as well as the issue of guidelines for responsible transition of stem cell research into appropriate clinical applications3, as witnessed by the very recent initiatives of the European Commission and of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. (more…)
Tagged with: Claudio Bordignon, Stem Cells, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in chemistry to Fenn, Tanaka, and Wüthrich for their work on methods for the identification and structural characterisation of biomolecules has heralded the increasing importance of proteomics in biomedical and fundamental research. Today, vendors offer a variety of mass spectrometric instruments to provide a growing number of laboratories access to technologies best suited to address their research questions. The improvements in instrument sophistication have been matched with improvements in analytical software to increase the amount of data obtained from the proteomic samples. The last decade has also seen an increasing integration of automation so that core laboratories can now operate on a 24/7 schedule. Perhaps most importantly, the rising prominence of proteomics is due to the new generation of proteomics researchers being trained worldwide. (more…)
Tagged with: Daniel Boismenu, Montreal Proteomics Network, Proteomics
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
Among the challenges for the pharmaceutical industry, declining research productivity and increasing research costs take a prominent position. This is often put in the context of efforts in the pharmaceutical industry to automate and “industrialise” research activities, combinatorial chemistry and High Throughput Screening being the most prominent examples. An argument is being put forward that the industry replaced scientists with robots and scientists’ ingenuity with mindless screening. It is then concluded that the investments into automation were misguided and led to a decline in research productivity. (more…)
Tagged with: Lab Automation, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Ulrich Schopfer
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
As the industry approaches the five year anniversary of the ground breaking regulator initiatives (the ‘PAT framework’ and ‘cGMPs for the 21st Century’1,2), it is time to assess the impact they have had on the industry and to look forward to what the industry may look like in another five years time. In some ways the initiatives need to be considered as ‘facilitators’, enabling the business driven activities (which had already started in many pharmaceutical companies) to flourish; these activities, driven by reducing risk by increased process understanding, were already common in other advanced manufacturing industries. (more…)
Tagged with: Martin Warman, Martin Warman Consultancy Ltd, PAT
Industry Focus 2009 / 10 January 2009 /
The historical demarcation of prokaryotes has not been by way of a specific scientific-based concept, but has been defined by a more arbitrary, anthropocentric system, rooted in the practical necessity of the time of its inception, based on the information available at the time. Therefore, species are historically defined on the basis of the disease they cause. (more…)
Tagged with: Andrew Middleton, GlaxoSmithKline, GSK
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