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Mar. 15, Vol. 32, No. 6

BioBusiness
- Point of View
  - For Biofuels, Escaping from Titer Binds Is Key
  - Zachary N. Russ
  - When you hear a politician talking about renewable energy and how it will remove dependence on foreign oil, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, and reduce gas prices, what do you imagine? Do you think of the standard icons: gleaming solar ... more »
- Corporate Profiles
  - Vaccine Manufacturing Gets Boost from Tobacco Plants
  - Carol Potera
  - Medicago says it’s improving the production of influenza vaccines in two ways: The firm starts with virus-like particles (VLPs) to generate a vaccine, and then it manufactures large quantities of a vaccine in the leaves of tobacco plants. Its techno ... more »
- BioMarket Trends
  - FDA Releases Biosimilars Guidelines to Little Fanfare
  - Patricia Fitzpatrick Dimond, Ph.D.
  - On February 9, FDA issued long-awaited guidelines designed, according to FDA drug division director Janet Woodcock, M.D., “to help industry develop biosimilar versions of currently approved biological products.” Paul Calvo, Ph.D., a director at Ster ... more »
Drug Discovery
- Feature Articles
  - Novel ADMET Technologies Gain Traction
  - MaryAnn Labant
  - Too many new drug compounds fail in late-stage clinical trials due to inefficacy and safety concerns. With often-cited costs of $800 million to bring a new drug to market, a compelling need exists for improved early-stage screening. Insufficient kno ... more »
- Tutorials
  - Efficient Compound and Sample Management
  - Mark Gedrych
  - David Booth
  - Research programs using large compound or sample repositories, such as those prevalent in the drug discovery industry, require efficient management to maximize usability and minimize costs. Such collections can be very diverse, ranging from small mo ... more »
- Sidebars
  - A Novel Approach to Predictive Toxicology
  - Arthur Weissman, Ph.D.
  - Benjamin Lineberry
  - The field of safety toxicology is entering a new era shaped by the burden of evaluating the ever-growing number and diversity of chemical entities to determine their impact on the environment and human health. The need for establishing a new way to ... more »
OMICS
- Feature Articles
  - Revealing Subcellular Heterogeneity
  - Vicki Glaser
  - Steady progress in a variety of technologies, such as gene-expression profiling, proteomics, and next-generation sequencing, is helping to characterize tissues and cells and to catalog the differences between healthy and diseased tissues. The abilit ... more »
- - RNA Advances Reshape Prevailing Wisdom
  - Richard A. Stein, M.D., Ph.D.
  - Expanding on a concept originally coined by Walter Gilbert in 1986, Thomas Cech recently described two RNA worlds—a hypothetical, primordial world in which the same molecule combined informational and catalytic properties, and a contemporary world, ... more »
- Assay Tutorials
  - Measurement of Cardiomyocyte Contractions
  - Markus Schmitz, Ph.D.
  - A research team led by Bruno Becker, Ph.D., from AstraZeneca’s R&D bioscience department, CVGI, Molndal, Sweden, tested Roche’s xCELLigence Cardio Instrument ( Figure 1 ) for label-free and noninvasive screening for cardiotoxic and arrhythmic ef ... more »
Bioprocessing
- Feature Articles
  - Developing Next-Gen Conjugate Vaccines
  - Philippe Dro
  - The vaccine market experienced significant growth over the last decade, with global revenues exceeding $24 billion in 2010, up from $7 billion in 2004. Major growth drivers were the increasing awareness of vaccine-preventable diseases as well as the ... more »
- - Harnessing Innovation to Improve Expression Systems
  - David Daniels, Ph.D.
  - Technical advances in the use of protein-expression systems have enabled scaled production of membrane proteins and other difficult to express proteins. These advances have also helped preserve the structure and function of the expressed proteins. ... more »
- Tutorials
  - Removing Impurities from Biotherapeutics
  - Michael Thomas
  - Membrane adsorbers accelerate purification of biotherapeutics due to their ease of use, small footprint, and flow rate independent binding. This tutorial examines the impurity removal offered by QyuSpeed™ D (QSD), a hollow fiber anion-exchange membr ... more »
Translational Medicine
- Feature Articles
  - Biomarker Analysis Makes Strides
  - Kathy Liszewski
  - Personalized medicine made significant strides in 2011 with two new targeted cancer therapies, the FDA release of its companion diagnostics draft guidance, and routine clinical genotyping for some oncology applications. However, many challenges rema ... more »
- - Reductionism Gives Way to Systems Biology
  - Timothy Galitski, Ph.D.
  - For more than a decade, systems biology has grown rapidly, mainly in academic labs. It is now entering a new phase of commercial opportunity, spreading the practice of systems biology from lab to lab and to the clinic. The biggest challenge facing s ... more »