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27 March 2007 | By John Neiger, Technical writer and consultant
It is some years since the ISO 14644 and 14698 series of international cleanroom standards started taking over from national standards. Early parts are already undergoing their statutory five-year reviews; other parts have only recently been published and new parts are still being written.
27 March 2007 | By EPR
Q1: Please outline the general process of Phase I clinical trials. Burnand: Phase I is the screening for safety process and it’s the first time that a product is given to a human being. The aim at this stage is to demonstrate that the product isn’t dangerous. The data will…
27 March 2007 | By Montanari R. and Rizzi A., Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale, Università degli Studi di Parma
Current trends show that the Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) technology and Electronic Product Code (EPC) are experiencing increasing diffusion. Several business applications adopting RFID are currently expected to grow strongly. Bar codes and RFID will coexist for many years, although the former is likely to progressively replace the latter in some…
25 January 2007 | By Chih-Ping Mao, Department of Pathology, Chien-Fu Hung, Ph.D, Department of Pathology and Oncology and T-C Wu, Ph.D., Department of Pathology, Oncology, Obstetrics and Gynecology and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Immunotherapy has recently emerged as an attractive form of treatment for cancer due to the potential of the immune system to eradicate tumours without inflicting damage on normal tissue. However, natural immune responses are usually inadequate to control cancer progression and require enhancement by vaccines.
25 January 2007 | By Dr. Ina K. Dahlsveen, Exiqon
The last few years have seen a rush of discoveries within a new field of post-transcriptional gene regulation. microRNAs, or miRNAs for short, are small regulating RNAs akin to small interfering RNAs (siRNA), but which are naturally expressed in vivo. Originally discovered in C. elegans 14 years ago, these small…
25 January 2007 | By Ze’ev Gechtman, Ph.D., formerly of Johnson & Johnson
While scientific discoveries can be turned into financial assets, the scientific process itself has proven difficult to harness to efficiently create marketed products bringing profits. This translation is especially challenging for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries owing to the tremendous complexity of biological systems.
25 January 2007 | By Peter Haddock, PhD., Pfizer Global Research and Development, CNS Pharmacology
Ion channels play key roles in regulating cardiac, neuronal and secretory tissue function. As such, the pharmacological modulation of ion channel activities may provide an effective means to positively impact upon an array of disease states. However, the reliance on low-capacity manually operated electrophysiology screening systems has dictated that ion…
25 January 2007 | By EPR
In a previous article the important role of protein crystallography in the optimisation of drug candidates was highlighted1. An essential part of this process is establishing robust protein crystallisation systems that can be used for both soaking and co-crystallisation experiments. This may mean producing many hundreds of X-ray quality crystals…
25 January 2007 | By Mikael Kubista, TATAA Biocenter and MultiD Analyses AB, Sweden, Björn Sjögreen, Center for Applied Scientific Computing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, United States and MultiD Analyses AB, Amin Forootan, MultiD Analyses AB, Radek Sindelka and Jiri Jonák, Laboratory of Gene Expression, Institute of Molecular Genetics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and José Manuel Andrade, Dept of Analytical Chemistry, University of A Coruna, Spain
Real-time PCR has rapidly become the preferred technique for quantitative analysis of nucleic acids. Its superior sensitivity, reproducibility and dynamic range make it the preferred choice for expression profiling in scientific, as well as routine, applications.
25 January 2007 | By Dr. Henning Gieseler, PhD., Department of Pharmaceutics, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Freeze drying is generally known to be a time consuming and therefore expensive process. In order to lower costs during manufacturing, the effective cycle time must be reduced. This goal can be achieved by optimising a freeze drying cycle in the laboratory – in particular the primary drying phase. Applying…
25 January 2007 | By Ronan O’Kennedy, Biopharmaceutical Process Development, Biopharmaceutical CEDD, GlaxoSmithKline
The biopharmaceuticals industry has undergone a number of revolutions in the past decade, not least the variety of ‘omics’ that focus on high throughput technologies to identify new product targets and can rapidly characterise those targets at small scale. However, it has been widely recognised that the technology used in…
25 January 2007 | By Dr Andrew M. Middleton, GlaxoSmithKline
Subsequent to the publication of the PDA technical Report Number 33 in 20001 there has been a multitude of articles published in pharmaceutical reviews and commentaries with regard to rapid microbial methods (RMM). The majority of these articles cover, to a greater or lesser degree, the technologies available and summaries…
28 November 2006 | By Dr. Eberhard Krausz, HT-Technology Development Studio (TDS), Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)
Huge progress has been made, both in RNA interference technology applied to mammalian cells and in automated microscopy to analyse gene functions upon silencing in the cellular context. Large-scale siRNA screens have been published recently, mainly applying assays that gain multi-parametric information on biological processes. It is a long way…
28 November 2006 | By John R. Yates, III, Department of Cell Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, Thierry Rabilloud, DBMS/BMCC, Alexander W. Bell, Montreal Proteomics Centre, McGill University and John J. M. Bergeron, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, McGill University, Quebec
Over the last ten years the Proteomics field has been a technologically dynamic area. New methods and techniques help drive the field to achieve more sophisticated measurements that yield increasingly larger volumes of data and information. This creates several problems.
