Life Sciences Thought Leaders

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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.

Using Nanomechanical Testing to Understand the Mechanical Efficiency of Biomaterials

Biological materials exhibit superior mechanical properties relative to their weight when compared to the majority of all man-made materials. In addition to this, organisms can construct these materials using a very limited palette.

From Bruker Nano Surfaces 8 Jun 2018

Discovering Antibodies with Universal Specificity

Professor Hedda Wardemann discusses our current knowledge of antibody specificity and how her research team are challenging this, through the discovery of anti-bacterial antibodies with universal specificity.

1 Jun 2018

Mapping the Genes Responsible for Pluripotency

Dr. Atilgan Yilmaz and his team have developed a method by which they can produce haploid human embryonic stem cells from oocytes. They combined this technique with CRISPR-Cas9 to generate an atlas of the genome, containing the functions of over 18,000 genes.

23 May 2018

Determining the Optimal Biomarker Frequency for Biosensors

Chi-En Lin won Metrohm’s Young Chemist of the Year award for his research into optimal biomarker frequencies, not just the novelty of the research but how it can be applied. Determining optimal biomarker frequencies for multimarker biosensors has wide ranging uses from rapid cancer screening methodologies, dry diagnostics, providing personalized medicine and helping to detect comorbidities before they become a problem.

From Metrohm AG 22 May 2018

Developing a High Throughput Mass Spectrometry Platform for Drug Discovery

Prof. Jonathan Wingfield, AstraZeneca, describes the collaboration with Labcyte and Waters to develop a high throughput mass spectrometry platform.

From Pittcon 18 May 2018

Advances in Cell Lineage Analysis

Dr. Jan Phillip Junker discusses the applications of CRISPR-Cas9 in cell lineage analysis and the development of tomo-seq; a method to study the spatial organization of cells within whole organisms.

9 May 2018

Can GAC Be Used to Control Priority Unregulated DBPs in Drinking Water?

In this interview, Prof. Susan Richardson discusses the use of GAC to control disinfection by-products.

From Pittcon 23 Apr 2018

Validating the Diagnosis of Depression

It’s very difficult to diagnose depression. With depression, you can't open the brain to find answers, and the chemistry of the brain is separate from the chemistry of the body.

From Pittcon 10 Apr 2018

Free Radical Formation in Electronic Cigarette Aerosols

An interview with Prof. John Richie, describing his presentation at Pittcon 2018 on free radical formation in electronic cigarette aerosols.

From Pittcon 5 Apr 2018

The Human Microbiome – A New Potential Fingerprint in Forensic Evidence?

Professor Jack Gilbert gives an overview of the Burglary Microbiome Project, which he discussed at Pittcon 2018.

From Pittcon 29 Mar 2018

Modifying Oncolytic Adenoviruses to Target Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is one of the less common but deadliest cancers. Modified oncolytic adenoviruses represent an alternative to chemotherapy and targeted therapies, which have a high mortality rate.

9 Mar 2018

Resolving Interfacial Protein Dynamics by STReM

STReM stands for Super Time-Resolved Microscopy, and as STORM, PALM, and other methods are designed to improve spatial resolution of optical microscopy, we desire to improve the time resolution. STReM makes use of point spread function engineering to encode fast events into each camera frame.

From Pittcon 16 Feb 2018

Producing Super-Swelled Lyotropic Monocrystals for Drug Development

An interview with Dr. Cecília Leal, about a new method for producing bicontinuous cubic phases that are super-swollen and exist as monocrystals in solution.

15 Feb 2018

Using CRISPR To Produce Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

An interview with Dr. Sheng Ding about using a modified version of the CRISPR-Cas9 system to produce induced pluripotent stem cells.

9 Feb 2018

Why Should We Weigh Every Protein in the Human Body?

Our mission is to advance the measurement of human proteins with greater precision, to bring to the world the benefits of absolute molecular specificity when it comes to interrogating proteins at the molecular level.

From Pittcon 5 Jan 2018

Epigenetics: A New Tool for Forensic Detectives

Developing analytical methods can help the triers of fact, judges and juries, better understand the events surrounding the circumstances of a crime. In forensic analysis, we are talking about determining the identity of unknown individuals through DNA and using DNA and other chemical signatures to determine and clarify the circumstances of the crime.

From Pittcon 20 Dec 2017

Spatial deconvolution of marker expression in whole heart subjected to ischemia-reperfusion

When a coronary artery is obstructed by atheroma, blood flow is depressed or even arrested. This causes hypoxia of cardiac cells associated with the deprivation of nutrients. In clinic, the first objective is to restore blood flow. However, this is associated with a burst in oxidation of cellular proteins and lipids. This oxidation enhances cell death and participates to the so-called reperfusion injury.

From Logos Biosystems 18 Dec 2017

Using AFM to characterize cancer cells

My name is James Gimzewski and I am a distinguished professor at UCLA. I'm in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department, but I am also heavily involved in the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. We were probably the first to pioneer the idea of what is now known as mechanobiology – the study of the mechanical properties of cancer cells as a potential diagnostic tool.

From Bruker Nano Surfaces 28 Nov 2017

Probing living cells with AFM

We study mammalian cells and try to understand how these cells interact with their environment. We mainly focus on the interactions that can occur with individual ligands.

From Bruker Nano Surfaces 21 Nov 2017

Applying AFM to study the viscoelastic properties of cells

Cell mechanics was already of interest very early on to people who were using the AFM. The AFM was invented in 1986 and the first biological samples, both proteins and lipid molecules, were investigated around 1989 and the first time cells were investigated was around 1990.

From Bruker Nano Surfaces 16 Nov 2017