MerLion Pharmaceuticals has entered into a large-scale screening
programme with Cancer Research Technology (CRT) to identify new
anti-cancer drug candidates derived from natural product chemistry.
Increasing adoption of computational biology tools in today's drug
discovery is the industry's attempt to compensate for shrinking
product pipelines as the industry also expects to reduce the
duration of the drug discovery...
According to a new report, the advancement of ADME/Tox technologies
will give rise to considerable time and cost savings as early
screening and increasingly innovative solutions continue to
underline the importance of this technology...
Melbourn Scientific is to launch a new pharmacopeial test facility
providing a range of contract analytical services to the
pharmaceutical industry. The move comes in response to market
demand.
Astex has announced that the United States Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has approved its Investigational New Drug
(IND) application for the clinical development of its cell cycle
inhibitor, AT7519, for the treatment of cancer.
Nanostream, has introduced a fraction collector add-on to its
Veloce system, transforming it into a front-end sample preparation
tool that lets users rapidly perform MS assays.
According to a recent report, the global bioinformatics market is
currently estimated at about $1.4 billion (€1.1 billion). It is
expected to grow at an average annual growth rate of 15.8 per cent
to reach nearly $3 billion by 2010,...
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has created a Centre of Excellence for
External Drug Discovery (CEEDD) that aims to provide GSK with
alternative scientific and drug discovery approaches. The CEEDD
also aims to exploit the full potential of...
Lonza is planning a major exansion of its peptides manufacturing
capacities at Visp, Switzerland, in response to what it said was
'the increased demand for peptide active pharmaceutical ingredients
worldwide'.
Leading drug developers and researchers are adopting new in vivo
models to streamline pre-clinical drug development in an effort to
cut costs that are increasing steadily throughout the
pharmaceutical industry's drug pipeline.
Molecular Devices launches two new reagent products for ADME assay
screening, which provide high throughput screening laboratories
with biologically relevant solutions to increase the throughput of
ADME-related compound profiling.
The wealth of new targets identified from genomics and the
discoveries made in the molecular pathology of cancer will give
rise to a new generation of cancer treatment, moving one step
closer to individualised, target therapy.
Drug research and development is facing a major problem with the
sheer influx of data generated, which threatens to further slow
down productivity, if its management and interpretation is not
efficiently dealt with.
In the first of a two-part interview, DrugResearcher.com
took time out to talk to Dr. Tim Jaeger, director of business
development at iAS interactive Systems, Germany. Speaking at the
recent Drug Discovery Technology Europe conference...
While the Drug Discovery Technology Europe show placed an emphasis
on issues surrounding drug research, companies serving the pharma
and biotech industries took the opportunity to showcase the latest
technologies that are set to prove...
Nanotechnology for molecular targeting and drug delivery is set to
become a trillion-dollar industry, fuelled by the pharmaceutical
industry, which faces increasingly challenging market conditions.
This has lead to an intensified...
A crystallised form of a new molecular machine may lead to new
drugs to combat human diseases by using a technique that removes
any malfunctioning genes. The thinking is that normal genes can
take over without actually changing the...
ITI Life Sciences launches the first R&D programme to develop
3-dimensional cell-based assays with fluorescence lifetime
detection technology that aims to address a significant bottleneck
in the drug discovery and development...
Qiagen launches a unique siRNA design service that provides a
guarantee that at least 50 per cent of the siRNAs produced will
result in efficient knockdown to the researcher's specific
requirements.
Vitra Bioscience and IDBS have entered into an agreement that
merges IDBS' MathIQ software with Vitra's CellCard System. The
combination of such technologies is an attempt to accelerate the
identification of lead compounds...
Peptide drugs look like they may finally fulfil their promise,
after years of what has largely been disappointment, if figures
released in a new market research report prove accurate.
Paradigm Therapeutics has announced it has completed the
acquisition of Amedis Pharmaceuticals with the aim of identifying
highly druggable targets and novel compounds for conditions in the
areas of CNS, pain, endocrinology and metabolism.
Cell-based assays are set to become the preferred choice of
screening, potentially overtaking more traditional approaches that
include traditional enzyme- or antibody-based assays.
Newron Pharmaceuticals has announced the company and a consortium
will use the money raised from European funding to utilise
drug-screening technology for the HTS of molecules for ion channel
targets for neurological and psychiatric...
Bioreason has launched ClassPharmer Suite Lite, a new edition of
the company's software system to increase success in the
hits-to-leads-to-clinic process within drug discovery.
German microfluidics company ThinXXS is to exhibit its novel
modular design system, the microfluidic construction kit, a
lab-on-a-chip (LOC) device that enables researchers to configure
required chip functions. The feature is sure...
High throughput protein (HTP) crystallography is set to undergo key
technical developments in which the development of automation in
protein expression, protein engineering and crystallisation will
provide the accurate screening data...
Nanotechnology for molecular targeting and drug delivery is set to
become a trillion-dollar industry with the drug sector's economic
and technological leadership key to the growth of the technology.
Caliper Life Sciences' LabChip technology continues to prove
popular with large pharmaceutical companies as its third quarter
financial results show a net loss that has more than halved from
its 3Q 2003 performance.
LION's strategy to move towards the informatics sector, shifting
the focus away from the drug development sector seems to be gaining
momentum as second quarter net losses were reduced to €3.4million
compared to €6.5 million in...
According to a report, it takes 7-10 years to develop and market a
drug with costs exceeding $800 million (€625 million). This
revelation is set to add to the pressure already facing
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies which...
A report focusing on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets
in Europe has singled out high throughput screening (HTS) as an
approach that will provide mechanistic insights and new drug leads
with improved efficiency whilst reducing...
Software provider Accelrys becomes the latest company to exploit
the use of compound databases in drug discovery. It has agreed to
integrate Sigma-Aldrich's chemical compound catalogs into Accelrys'
chemical suppliers database...
A collaboration between CompleGen and DuPont is set to
industrialize the pre-clinical drug development process and reduce
the time to bring a drug to market. Under terms, CompleGen will
gain access to a chemical library consisting...
Austrian company Inte:Ligand, which specializes in the development
of new drugs by computer simulation has launched a new software
package for modern drug design, which will provide pharma companies
with a tool to speed up the entire...
Constant innovation in the field of microfluidics and uTAS has
enabled lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technologies to successfully enter the
mainstream commercial market especially impacting on
high-throughput screening of drug candidates, point...
TransTech Pharma and Merck has announced a $26 million research
collaboration using TransTech's proprietary TTP Translational
Technology to discover and develop novel small molecules for a
therapeutic target of interest to Merck.
Researchers have claimed proteome mining could make the discovery
and development of cancer, hypertension, diabetes, inflammation and
infectious disease drugs enormously more effective, fast tracking
protein targets that can be tested...
Life sciences software company Optive Research has launched its
latest software for in silico drug discovery, making it
faster and easier for chemists to 'invent' new compounds for
lead discovery.
Locus Pharmaceuticals have acquired the drug discovery company
Protein Mechanics, which brings together novel technologies that
broaden the scope of drug targets and further strengthens its
position as a leading company in computational...
Pharmaceutical instrument supplier Argonaut has introduced the
Isolute PPT+ protein precipitation plates, created with the
intention of accelerating drug research and development.
Drug development company Jerini has transferred its peptide
technologies business unit to a wholly owned subsidiary which will
continue to provide and develop peptide-based services and products
for biomedical research.
The market for the tools and services in combinatorial chemistry
and high-throughput screening approached $3 billion in 2003
(€2.43bn), but a new set of challenges is shifting customers'
focus, according to a new study.
Moscow, Russia-based Quantum Pharmaceuticals is offering
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies the opportunity to test
the latest version of its molecular docking software - Quantum 2.0
- at no cost, reports Phil Taylor.
Companies developing new drugs for the global market must deal with
the rising costs of the R&D process - and outsourcing may well
be the best route, according to Dr Faiz Kermani, a specialist in
outsourcing and research development.
Swedish drug discovery technology company Cellectricon has raised a
total of SEK 53 million (€5.8 million) following the completion of
its latest Series B financing round, writes Wai Lang Chu.
Computer giant IBM claims to have identified seven key technologies
that will drive innovation in the pharmaceutical industry over the
next decade, raise the quality of development and manufacturing
processes and slash the pre-launch...
Two years into a major drive to exit the drug development sector
and reinvent itself as an informatics pure-play, Germany's LION
bioscience trimmed its net losses in the 12 months ended 31 March
to €22 million, in line with its...
A reluctance by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to
invest in drug discovery technologies has been holding back the
market for combinatorial chemistry, but this is expected to change
over the next few years, according to...
A new study has provided a 'cautiously optimistic' estimate of
spending on drug discovery and other areas of R&D over the next
couple of years, which will be music to the ears of technology
companies hit by a reluctance...
