News Medical's "Thought Leaders" series is a selection of articles written by national and
international experts and trusted advisers in the life sciences industry. All the articles are
written by experts who have been invited as recognised leaders in their fields to provide
a "state of the art" contribution.
The Phenome Center developed out of the Olympic drug testing facility, and we've adapted it so that we use NMR spectrometry, which we have three spectrometers, and mass spectrometry, to take blood and urine from hundreds and thousands of people and profile them to get a biochemical fingerprint of every person.
Molecular imaging aims at the visualization of molecules or molecular events that occur at the cellular level. Clearly it also allows the possibility of looking inside the biochemical pathway at the cellular level and therefore enables us to look at the onset of diseases well before they are resolved into structural change.
These particles are all classed as inorganic particles, which can all be utilised in biomedical applications. They differ in terms of their inherent material and size dependent physiochemical properties, for example, their optical and magnetic properties.
Nanogels are synthetic particles that can be used for drug delivery. They are approximately 100 nm to 200 nm in diameter, and are made from safe, biocompatible materials: a gel-like interior and a lipid exterior.
Gold nanoparticles are tiny spherical particles made out of gold atoms with sizes on nanometre scale. This is around 1,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair.
This is a new research centre led by the University of Limerick that supports the pharmaceutical sector in Ireland. The centre will carry out research on the key aspects of what it takes to synthesise the pharmaceutically active molecule to isolate a pure material and to formulate this into a medicine.
The reason Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) exists is to find ways to treat or prevent childhood disease. Our research programs are focussed on the areas of cancer cell growth, nerve cell signalling, embryology and gene therapy. These four programs have a shared aim of translating novel findings into new treatments for the benefit of families everywhere.
Automated DNA synthesis has been around for almost three decades. The key difference between the established methodology for making oligodeoxynucleotides (short stretches of single-stranded DNA) and our method is the template strand.