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.

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 SP Scientific 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

Centrifugal concentrators for biological applications

In life science labs around the world the task of concentration of a solute in a solution is commonly achieved using evaporator technology. Such technologies are also widely used in the concentration of pharmaceutical / natural product preparations using an extraction, precipitation and drying of the crude active agent protocol.

From SP Scientific 16 Mar 2017

Bacterial cell counting and sizing using the Multisizer

Two application areas seeing a major surge for the Multisizer are in environmental research and for optimization of recombinant protein expression in the lab. An example of the former is work published last year by researchers at the University of Aalborg in Denmark. They used the Multisizer 4e instrument to count and size pathogenic E. coli and to study the ability of another environmental organism D. magna to reduce this pathogenic E. coli strain in the environment.

From Beckman Coulter Life Sciences - Particle Counting and Characterization 15 Mar 2017

Losing Energy vs. Losing Samples, Trade-offs in Sample Storage

The global biopreservation market was valued at $2 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $3.7B US by 2020. Z-SC1 is operating in the biopreservation equipment segment of this market, especially dealing with mechanical freezers.

From Z-SC1 Biomedical Corp 6 Mar 2017

NMR and metabolic phenotyping: an interview with Dr Hartmut Schäfer

The Phenome Center Birmingham is a large, state-of-the-art, £8M metabolic phenotyping facility that has been established as part of a stratified medicine initiative led by the Medical Research Council. It is mainly located in the School of Biosciences

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 31 Jan 2017

Selecting the correct microscope camera in digital pathology

Recent advances in technology have allowed camera systems take advantage of faster protocols, and to use sensor chips with greater light sensitivity and reduced output noise to deliver better image quality, detail, and response to the pathologist.

From Lumenera Corporation 7 Dec 2016

Honey profiling for impurities and falsifications

Without testing commercially available honey, it is impossible to guarantee that is safe, natural and authentic. This is because bees are free agents, they cannot be restricted to a specific region, or to a type of plant that you would like them to pollinate.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 6 Dec 2016

Applying quantitative microscopy to live cells

Microscopy's got a long history. It was developed about 350 years ago for scientists to visualize things they could discern, but not describe. The two pioneers of microscopy were Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, who developed the first microscope and soon after the renowned scientist, Robert Hooke.

From BioTek 2 Dec 2016

Spinal cord rehabilitation and repair: an interview with Quentin Barraud

There are many grades of spinal cord injuries, in terms of range of movement, from small disabilities to becoming wheelchair bound for the rest of your life, the range is very broad.

From Logos Biosystems 15 Nov 2016

dsDNA quantification for next generation sequencing quality control: an interview with Andrew Jones

Quantity and quality of input samples are two key considerations in successful library preparation for next generation sequencing. The ultimate success or failure of a library preparation is often...

From DeNovix Inc. 10 Nov 2016