The speed at which researchers developed effective vaccines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 required unprecedented international cooperation on a scale never seen before. Rollout of approved vaccines is underway in many countries across the globe, giving people hope that the end to the pandemic is finally in sight. Meanwhile, researchers are continuing to investigate …

Targeted cancer therapy has been a game changer in cancer treatment, significantly improving the survival and quality of life of many patients. Unlike chemotherapy, which acts on both cancer and normal cells, targeted therapy affects only the specific oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, or pathways involved in tumor progression. Despite the success of targeted cancer therapy, …

Laboratories rely on microplate readers to translate experimental observations into raw data in order to process and analyze results. Microplate readers detect signals within assays, turning the targeted biological, chemical or physical signal into an optical signal so researchers can quantify the target of interest. Using a microplate reader is efficient and minimizes operational time …

The success of drug discovery labs lies in optimized workflows. Countless hours and valuable resources are often spent on physically preparing and loading plates into readers-that time could be spent analyzing data or researching a novel, potentially breakthrough target. There’s a constant hunt for new, effective vaccines that could replace current, commonly used ones that …

Antibody therapeutics have grown in complexity over their 30-year history in clinical application. Newer generation antibody therapies target multiple modalities and are multi-specific in nature. A multi-specific protein therapeutic can function as an alternative to a cell therapy. For example, an antibody can be engineered to target a T cell receptor and a tumor receptor …

Improved cellular imaging technologies are providing researchers with more robust datasets while maintaining high data quality. While this is a plus for drug discovery workflows, it also presents its own challenges: how to evaluate the large datasets in a timely manner and obtain deeper insights from the expanded data. Artificial intelligence is providing a way …

Industry leaders reveal how high throughput screening is changing in R&D What do you think are the major trends in drug discovery R&D? Biologics are booming. Small screens are better than large ones. Biochemical assays have the highest success rate. Think again. That is not what PerkinElmer found in a comprehensive survey of leaders at …

COVID-19 is a difficult disease to understand and treat. Using drugs that are already on the market was the quickest path forward to evaluate these compounds and possibly help patients now because novel drug development typically takes years. Scientists needed to evaluate the field of potential drugs-and fast. When a research team at the National …

Impaired glucose consumption is one of the principal markers for many disease conditions such as cancer, diabetes, obesity, and some neurologic disorders. Positron emission tomography (PET) is the most commonly used technique for imaging and quantifying glucose uptake. It has significant drawbacks for laboratory use, however, namely the short half-life of the reagent, the need …

In drug development, assays are test systems that gauge the effects of chemical compounds on certain cellular, molecular, or biochemical processes. They are a vital step in modern pharma research that pushes drugs to market faster. These screens can accurately replicate physiologic conditions, making the development of replicable assays vital for drug development and discovery …

IT infrastructure within a pharmaceutical lab is influential in how successful data collection and transfer can be. With the knowledge that data is vital for driving successful drug discovery, your lab’s IT solutions should be used to optimize and accelerate research. Regardless of what operating platform your lab uses, there should be documentation that details …

When time is of the essence, it helps to have the right technology on hand. This is especially applicable to labs involved in the development of highly sought-after viral therapeutics and vaccines. These labs require access to high-throughput or ultra-high-throughput screening; viruses, particularly those that have evolved over time, can be quite evasive in their …

One of the top news topics right now concerns the spread of the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2, which is believed to have begun in Wuhan, China and has since infected hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The virus, which can cause a severe form of pneumonia and lead to acute respiratory distress, currently has no FDA-approved …

A biomarker, as defined by the National Cancer Institute, is a biological molecule found in blood, other bodily fluids, or tissues that is a sign of a normal or abnormal process – or of a condition or disease. They are analytically measurable, are generally predictive, and have a variety of uses, from determining someone’s risk …

The complex relationship between a virus and its host is one of the hottest topics in science right now, and has been given considerable attention in recent weeks as a result of the race to understand the virus that causes COVID-19 and its potential vulnerabilities. It is longstanding knowledge that viruses cannot replicate without a …

Within a few weeks of the outbreak, scientists in Wuhan, China were able to isolate and sequence the new highly contagious viral genome in our current pandemic. Since then, the GISAID’s database has been tracking the viral sequences that have been isolated from patients worldwide. From this data, scientists have begun to try to classify …

More and more researchers are turning to 3D cell models for high-content screening to better understand diseases and to test potential therapeutics. But getting good high-content data out of these little aggregates of cells isn’t always easy – sometimes they don’t grow the same way each time you prepare them, and other times, getting good …

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every industry, with many measures intended to prevent spread i.e. social-distancing, masks, stay-in-place – remain firmly in place, significantly altering the way life is lived and business is conducted. The pharmaceutical industry is no exception with clinical trials are underway to develop a vaccine and identify potential therapeutics. However, …

High-content screening technology has the potential to accelerate research by extracting huge amounts of information from images of cells, on a cell-by-cell basis. However, many researchers analyze only a small number of the properties captured within their images which means they’re missing out on valuable information from their precious cells. It’s not about making use …

Time is of the essence when it comes to the development of a vaccine for the novel infectious disease in our current pandemic. The world has changed due to its impact – and the race to discover a vaccine is crucial for our return to normalcy. As viruses evolve over time, new, agile research applications …

Although the novel coronavirus is the subject of nearly every media story right now, several years ago it was the Zika virus (ZIKV) gathering a great deal of attention. Zika stems from the flavivirus family, and is primarily transmitted via Aedes mosquitoes and sexual contact. Maternal Zika virus infection has the potential to result in …

Time away from the lab is limited and valuable. You need to return from SLAS in San Diego with new tools to raise your scientific research… your “Out of the Office ROI.” Here are ten key tutorials, presentations and posters designed to help you achieve fast, accurate and reproducible results in precision medicine, next generation …

Drug discovery is always evolving. From new processes to advanced technologies, excellence in drug discovery is the result of combining different approaches. And each approach brings a specific answer. Successful researchers and companies master and use different technologies, making sure the interpretation of data does not suffer experimental or analytical bias and leads to better …

Following the announcement that PerkinElmer has acquired Cisbio Bioassays, here is a little more information about the exciting opportunities this brings to life sciences researchers. Over the last 20 years, Cisbio has become a leading Life Sciences company which develops, manufactures, and markets high quality kits and reagents for the drug discovery and life science …

Programmed Death Cells Imagine treating cancer by simply flipping a switch. In this instance, that biological switch activates therapeutic antitumor immunity by blocking immune checkpoints in our bodies that exist to prevent our immune system from attacking the body’s own cells. Sounds great, right? There is only one major problem. Many tumor cells escape anti-tumor …

Image of 3D InSight™ Human Liver Microtissues from InSphero labeled with Hoechst (nuclei, blue) and CellMask™ Deep Red plasma membrane stain (membranes, red) acquired on Operetta CLS high-content analysis system using a water immersion lens (40x). Critical Factors for Effective 3D Cellular Imaging Since its introduction in the early 1990s to today, 3-dimensional (3D) imaging …