Editor's Pick: Life Science Interviews from 2019

Editor's PickOur Favourite Life Science Interviews from 2019

2019 was a great year for News-Medical Life Sciences. We had the pleasure of conducting some fascinating interviews with leading thought-leaders from the life sciences community. Here are just a few of our favorites.

Using Multiplex Assays to Discover Biomarkers for Parkinson’s Disease

At the start of 2019, we spoke to Dr. Nicole Polinski from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF) and Dr. Elnaz Atabakhsh from Abcam, about the importance of developing biomarkers for the Parkinson’s and partnership between MJFF and Abcam.

Abcam and The Michael J. Fox Foundation have been working together for almost ten years. The collaboration aims to develop antibodies for difficult-to-detect targets in Parkinson's disease.

Find out what happened when we interviewed Nicole and Elnaz here.

Super-Resolution Raman Imaging with Plasmonic Substrates

In late spring, we caught up with Renee Frontiera, Associate Professor from the University of Minnesota, to discuss the development of a super-resolution Raman microscope that could one day supersede fluorescence-based super-resolution microscopes.

The technique combines two different techniques that are already available. From the microscopy community, we borrowed ideas from Stimulated Emission Depletion Microscopy (STED). We combined this with expertise from the field of Stimulated Raman Microscopy to create a super-resolution microscopy technique.

Essentially, our microscope involves a three-laser beam technique, where we generate a stimulated Raman signal in a sample, and then we can turn it off in a donut-shaped region around this initial excitation spot. We get a Raman signal only from the centre of this donut. This is similar to how STED works with fluorescence.

Watch the video, 'Ultrafast and Nanoscale', featuring Renee Frontiera.

Data Integrity in the Pharmaceutical Industry

During the summer we had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Christoph Jansen, market manager food & pharma at Mettler Toledo about data integrity in the pharmaceutical industry and some of the hurdles of digitizing a formerly paper-based set of records and procedures.

Typically, a pharmaceutical analytical QC laboratory has a large mixture of instruments that generate data and results. Different techniques, brands and models. Many of them might not come with software and even if they do, it is a big effort to validate them all. A proper computer system validation may take 3-6 months depending on the level of experience of the validation team and if they follow certain practices.

"The future of data integrity is digital. It does not take much to predict this. Whereas paper records will always be accepted, especially when there is no electronic alternative, it will become more and more difficult to pass audits with paper, I suppose." ~ Read the full interview here.

Spatial Gene Expression Profiling of Neurological Disorders

In October, we spoke to Cedric Uytingco, Ph.D. about the key benefits of visualizing gene expression patterns in neurological samples. Traditionally, neuroscientists used histology to infer cell type based on known morphology and location of cells. However, using this classification alone can obscure information that is necessary to understand normal development and disease pathology.

Gaining an understanding of gene expression patterns and cell-to-cell interactions within tissue provides additional context, magnifying insights that can be gained and accelerating biological discovery.

Read the interview by clicking here.