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28 September 2006 | By Carlo E.A. Jochems and Stefan Herzig, Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Köln
Ion channels are membrane proteins that regulate the entrance and departure of specific ions from cells, thus influencing the physiology of all cells. These ion flows also underlie electrical impulses required for sensory and motor functions of the brain, control of contraction of heart, skeletal, smooth and vascular muscle, as…
28 September 2006 | By Graham Cook Ph.D., Director Technology and External Supply, EMEA, Wyeth
Is the pharmaceutical manufacturing environment of today becoming more challenging? There is increasing pressure to control or reduce costs because of the limitations on healthcare budgets. Asset utilisation, operating efficiencies and cycle times in the pharmaceutical industry generally compare unfavourably with other high technology industries. Despite the resources invested in…
28 September 2006 | By Bart Hazes, Dept. of Medical Microbiology & Immunology, University of Alberta and Bernhard Rupp, q.e.d. life science discoveries, inc.
Protein crystallography has been embraced by the pharmaceutical industry to accelerate and rationalise the drug development process. In this role, success rates, throughput and turnaround times have become key competitive factors, and nearly every stage in the protein crystallography process has been targeted for automation using robotics and advanced software.…
28 September 2006 | By Jinghai J. Xu, Ph.D., Margaret C. Dunn, Arthur R. Smith, Pfizer Global Research and Development
Traditionally, in vivo histopathological findings have been used as part of standard readouts for safety assessment of new chemical entities (NCEs). The process typically involves dosing animals with NCEs for varying amounts of time, harvesting their major organs at the end of the study, preparing tissue sections and slides and…
28 September 2006 | By EPR
The growing popularity of Electronic Data Capture (EDC) is indicative of a broad recognition that EDC as a method of data capture offers significant realisable benefits. Developers of drugs that use EDC within their clinical research processes will have a significant competitive advantage, bringing new drugs and therapies to market…
28 September 2006 | By Tony Cundell, Director, Pharmaceutical Sciences – Microbiology, Schering Plough Research Institute
Following on from our latest report in Issue 4 in which we outlined independent views on ‘solutions for the next stage’ in Rapid Microbiological Methods (RMM) from some of the industry’s leading names, Tony Cundell follows up with his own thoughts on this exciting field.
28 September 2006 | By Dr Danielle Giron, President, Swiss Society for Thermal Analysis & Calorimetry
Thermal analysis methods and coupled techniques are well established procedures in material science. Due to the different information delivered, thermal analysis methods are concurrent or complementary to other analytical techniques such as spectroscopy, chromatography, melting point determination, loss on drying, assay, for identification, purity and quantitation. They are basic methods…
28 September 2006 | By Michael E. Burczynski, Ph.D. and Ole E. Vesterqvist, Ph.D. Biomarker Laboratory, Clinical Translational Medicine, Wyeth Research
Biomarkers (biological markers) have become an integral part of both drug discovery and drug development and play an important role in the transition of potential new drugs from discovery into clinical drug development. In the past, most biomarkers were proteins/peptides and metabolites measured by technologies such as immunoassays, enzymatic assays,…
20 July 2006 | By Dr Yan Sun, MitoCheck Project Manager, Institute of Molecular Pathology
MitoCheck is a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research project on cell cycle control. It is funded by the European Union within its 6th framework program (FP6). Leading scientists from 11 research institutes, universities and industry in Austria, Germany, UK, Italy and France with a wide range of expertise in molecular and cell…
20 July 2006 | By Sakari Kauppinen, Joacim Elmen and Phil Kearney, Santaris Pharma
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are an abundant class of short endogenous RNAs that act as important post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression.
20 July 2006 | By Dr Anne Katrin Werenskiold, Project Manager, Interaction Proteome
The investigation of functional protein-protein interactions has been gaining momentum with recent technological innovations. The high-throughput era in genomics and proteomics research is essentially dependent on technological advancements to drastically increase capacities in both large-scale gathering of data; their interpretation and functional validation, as well as the compilation and storage…
20 July 2006 | By Dr Lorenz M. Mayr, Executive Director & Head Biochemical Screening and Dr Hartmut Zehender, Labhead SpeedScreen, Biochemical Screening, Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research
Drug (lead) discovery relies on massive screening of chemical libraries against various extra- and intracellular molecular targets to find compounds with the desired mode of action. Sequencing of the human genome1 has generated a large number (>40 per cent) of new molecular targets with unknown function (‘orphan targets’), as well…
20 July 2006 | By Dolores Diaz, CEREP and Peter J. O’Brien, Safety Sciences Europe, Pfizer Global R&D
The statins (3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A [HMG-CoA] reductase inhibitors) are drugs that inhibit cholesterol biosynthesis by blocking the formation of the cholesterol precursor mevalonate. Statins are the most effective cholesterol-lowering agents available and are considered the first line of treatment for most patients with high serum cholesterol levels1.
20 July 2006 | By Claire Townsend, Ph.D., Investigator, GlaxoSmithKline
As a classically trained electrophysiologist, I shall always remember my first encounter with automated patch clamp at Essen Instruments in June 2002. Essen Instruments had just developed the IonWorks HT, an instrument that can record currents from 48 cells simultaneously and perform up to 384 recordings with a drug addition…
20 July 2006 | By Jean-Marie Geoffroy, Ph.D., Director, Pharmaceutical Development, TAP Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
So far in 2006 we have published contributions on a variety of PAT-related topics, including training (Issue 1), NIR (Issue 2) and the role of PAT in biotechnology (Issue 3). In this article Jean-Marie Geoffroy reports on the business case for PAT with his own interpretation and charts the road…
