Life Sciences Insights from Industry

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"Insights from Industry" is a dynamic series of interviews at the cutting edge of the life sciences industry. Every interviewee is a leader in their particular field and is handpicked to give an informative and accessible insight into their chosen field. These interviews are guaranteed to keep you in the know in a rapidly changing industry.

Investigating new cancer therapy candidates with live-cell imaging

There are two main things that we've worked on in the lab as regards to drug studies. One is identifying new combinations of drugs, and working on why a combination of drugs should work better than each alone.

From Essen BioScience, Inc. A Sartorius Company 16 Oct 2017

Freezing Point Osmometry in Life Science Applications

Osmometry is a method to determine a sample´s osmolality. This is the total number of osmotically active particles solved in a solution. These particles influence the colligative properties of the solution, which include the boiling and freezing point but also the vapor pressure for instance.

From KNAUER Wissenschaftliche Geräte GmbH 9 Oct 2017

Understanding molecular mechanisms and metabolic pathways of yeast for drug discovery

My research uses budding yeast as a tool for synthetic biology, and also in chemical and functional genomic applications. We are interested in understanding molecular mechanisms and metabolic pathways of yeast for drug discovery.

From Tecan 27 Sep 2017

Neurohistology: how whole slide scanning impacts workflow

Leveraging the mass production benefit that MultiBrain® technology brings to neurohistology, NSA can accelerate the R&D preclinical and safety assessment processes many fold and perform them less expensively. This results in faster times for a potential drug to move from R&D to clinical trials and sooner for use in people.

From Huron Digital Pathology 21 Sep 2017

Consolidated beer analysis on single, integrated platform

Jules Wyss is the head of the quality assurance laboratory at the largest brewery in Switzerland, the Feldschlösschen brewery in Rheinfelden. The master brewer and beverage technologist helped to set up the QA lab from 1991 onward.

From Metrohm AG 13 Sep 2017

Generation Genome: the UK’s genetics revolution?

The report set out the NHS’ intentions of routinizing whole genome sequencing. It is particularly focused towards rare diseases and cancers, although conditions such as obesity, bacterial and other infections are also included.

11 Sep 2017

Seeing the full picture, real-time analysis of live-cells

Every cell is a miniature factory taking in raw material (extracellular signals) and processing it to produce something (a biological response). But unlike a factory that can be easily tweaked to run at steady-state and look the same from day to day, cells are dynamic.

From Essen BioScience, Inc. A Sartorius Company 7 Sep 2017

Optical species identification for preservation and species identification

Species identification is important for ecological research and in particular to study the impact of natural hazards or environmental pollutants present, because it’s possible to determine the general health of the ecosystem through the diversity of life that are found in a given area.

From Lumenera Corporation 22 Aug 2017

Optimizing beer’s shelf life using benchtop EPR

The main challenges in optimizing beer shelf life is that most manufacturers can only perform accelerated shelf life testing on packaged beer. So, it's almost impossible to determine where in the process you've had a positive or a negative impact on the freshness of the beer.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 3 Aug 2017

Bringing highly potent cell therapy products to market

There are two main challenges and both relate to manufacturing. The first one is to make sure you can manufacture therapies with reasonable costs and the second one is to make sure that you can balance the capacity you need with the demands.

31 Jul 2017

Diagnosing prostate cancer through a £225 urine test

This test, which we have branded SelectMDx for Prostate Cancer, came with the acquisition of a company in the Netherlands called NovioGendix. They developed a prototype assay, so they did most of the heavy lifting in terms of discovering the two specific biomarkers that are currently in the product. These biomarkers are tuned towards the detection of what I call clinically significant prostate cancer.

24 Jul 2017

Developing software for cell and gene therapy supply chain tracking

The first thing is, to always remember that we're dealing with a living drug, cells, which are very sensitive to environmental conditions, such as temperature and humidity etc. All of those things can impact on the viability of the drug and its effectiveness.

18 Jul 2017

Pharma, biotech and healthcare industries gender gap

The pharma and biotech industry continues to struggle to make progress with gender diversity. A recent Credit Suisse report shows that management diversity, as defined by percentage of women in senior management roles, has decreased globally from 18.9 percent in 2014 to 15.5 percent in 2016.

13 Jul 2017

Medtech, biotech and pharmaceuticals in Australia

Australia is an acknowledged world leader in the medical technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical (MTP) sector due to its vibrant ecosystem of start-ups and established companies and thriving research environment.

10 Jul 2017

Developing synthetic mediums for growing organoids

Organoids are bits of tissue grown in vitro, in a near-physiological 3D setting. The particularity consists in the fact that organoids retain features of the patient they are derived from, even when cultured outside of the human body. This is very different from what traditional, conventional cell culture has been able to do over the past 50 years or so.

13 Jun 2017

Without measurement, there is no control of aseptic processes

In the pharmaceutical industry, there are two main processes - non-sterile and sterile production. Non-sterile production includes tablets, syrups, ointments, and capsules. From a regulatory point of view, the processes can be microbiologically contaminated but within specified microbiological limits.

From Particle Measuring Systems 9 Jun 2017

Guide to solvent evaporation

Solvent removal covers a broad range of Chemical, Biological and Analytical applications where it is necessary to either remove an existing solvent from a solution completely, or to concentrate the solvent to facilitate analysis of a molecule of interest. This could be a single sample or many samples in parallel.

From Genevac Ltd 31 May 2017

Genomic analysis technologies: past, present and future

Illumina was founded in 1998. It was based on technology invented by Dr. David Walt that was licensed from Tufts University and formed the basis of our microarray business. The fundamental invention was a unique way to put beads in wells that were created on fiber optic bundles, with the beads being imaged through the fibers.

From Pittcon 10 Apr 2017

How will Brexit impact life sciences in Wales?

Life sciences is one of the Welsh Government’s nine priority sectors for the economy, in which it is supporting industry-led investment. The Life Sciences Hub Wales, in Cardiff, was opened in July 2014 with the aim of increasing the sector’s contribution to the Welsh economy by more than £1 billion by 2022.

28 Mar 2017

Linking RNA to autoimmune diseases

Well, the central dogma of biology states that DNA makes RNA and RNA makes proteins. However, there are many different types of RNAs, and only one of them, the messenger RNA (mRNA), gives rise to proteins. Some others don't make proteins at all.

20 Mar 2017