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In late October, we learned that an exciting and ambitious new entity – the Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium (BGTC) – had come into being in the US, designed to encourage the delivery of more gene therapies for rare diseases. The consortium is an interesting construct, headed and funded by the…
28 February 2012 | By Peter R. Allegrini, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
MRI is widely used for clinical diagnosis as well as in research areas such as preclinical drug discovery, clinical development and also in therapy monitoring. MRI allows non-invasive acquisition of tomographic images of soft tissue with high resolution and contrast. Furthermore, its ability to assess organ function in a broad…
19 October 2011 | By Sandra Siehler and Sandra W. Cowan-Jacob, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) control a plethora of key physiological functions in every cell of an organism. GPCRs are therefore involved in many diseases, since altered ligand or receptor levels and genetic or epigenetic modifications can lead to GPCR dysfunction and hence a pathophysiological phenotype. About one third of currently…
19 October 2011 | By Brendan Prideaux, Dieter Staab, Gregory Morandi, Nicole Ehrhard and Markus Stoeckli, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
Since its introduction in the field of biomedical imaging over 10 years ago1, matrixassisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI-MSI) has played an ever increasing role in drug discovery and development and is now utilised in laboratories of many leading pharmaceutical companies and collaborating academic institutions.
29 October 2010 | By Jason Borawski and L. Alex Gaither, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
In the past decade, the pharmaceutical industry has exploited the naturally occurring cellular RNAi pathway to enhance drug discovery research. The RNAi pathway, triggered by dsRNA, selectively, although not always specifically, degrades mRNA leading to substantial decreases in post-transcriptional gene expression1. Researchers have capitalised on this intrinsic pathway by synthesising…
19 August 2010 | By Gül Erdemli & Dmitri Mikhailov, Center for Proteomic Chemistry, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Sciences and Albert M Kim, Translational Medicine, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Sciences
The preclinical assessment of a small molecule’s liability for QT interval prolongation is an essential part of the drug discovery process. Patch clamp assays for heterologously expressed recombinant cardiac ion channels are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to evaluate potential drug-channel interactions. These assays are generally acute assessments and…
10 January 2009 | By
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…
19 July 2008 | By
MALDI FT-ICR MS platform for proteomics: Rationale for an offline approach and optimised implementation A number of sophisticated approaches have been developed to study the structure and function of genes, including the whole-scale sequencing of entire organisms[1], global transcriptional profiling[2], and forward genetic studies[3]. However, these techniques are ultimately limited…
19 March 2008 | By
The complexity of drug discovery faces many challenges; principally, the failure of drug candidates during the development process as a result of adverse effects or lack of efficacy. A key reason for this high attrition rate is that we are only just beginning to understand the complexity of the response(s)…
19 March 2008 | By
High content screening (HCS) is based on subcellular imaging using automated microscopy, in combination with automated image analysis. High content screening was first introduced over a decade ago as one of the promising new technologies, intended to address the bottleneck of secondary assays in the development of new drugs. Since…
23 November 2007 | By
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) consist of a growing heterogeneous class of transcripts defined as RNA molecules that lack any extensive “Open Reading Frame” (ORF) and function as structural, catalytic or regulatory entities rather than serving as templates for protein synthesis. While non-coding sequences make up only a small fraction of the…
2 February 2006 | By Jacques Hamon, Kamal Azzaoui, Steven Whitebread, Laszlo Urban, Edgar Jacoby, Bernard Faller, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
One major cause of the late failure of drugs in development (i.e. attrition) is the lack of clinical safety of the compounds (accounting for approximately 30% of failures together with toxicology)1. One of the key elements is the off-target effects of the compounds, causing adverse drug reaction (ADRs).
22 August 2005 | By Craig S. Mickanin, Research Investigator and Mark A. Labow, Executive Director, Genomic and Proteomic Sciences, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
Perhaps the most significant technological advancement in the study of gene function in the post-genome era has been the discovery that RNA interference (RNAi) can be exploited for depletion of endogenous mRNA in mammalian cells. As the pharmaceutical industry has fallen under intense pressure to both identify and validate high-quality…
7 March 2005 | By Dr. Ulrich Schopfer, Global Head of Compound Management, Dr. Frank Hoehn, Laboratory Head, Automation, Matthieu Hueber, Automation Engineer, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
Dispensing of solids is still a demanding task in laboratory automation. The solubilisation of High Throughput Screening (HTS) libraries is one of the most challenging problems in this area, since millions of different substances have to be processed by the same technology.
