Researchers at the School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University London (QMUL), are using a Malvern Instruments Zetasizer Nano to provide particle size and charge data that is being used in the development of innovative hydrogel matrices for 3D cell culture.
The Zetasizer Nano’s high performance electrophoretic light scattering capabilities are allowing researchers to better understand the nature of the electrostatic interactions between proteins and peptides. These measurements are crucial to developing bespoke cell culture platforms for the production of specific biologically significant hydrogel. By creating hydrogel structures based on the charge of target biomolecules, researchers at QMUL aim to...
A recent study by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kent, UK provides a detailed analysis of deep well microplates and the significant levels of contamination found in more than 50% of the commercially available plates tested
The study, following on from an earlier study in 2005, gives data on a large range of microplates from numerous manufacturers based in Europe, USA and China. Mass spectral data shows that persistent contamination from a range of compounds found in the raw polymer master batch continues to be evident in many of the microplates tested. The effect of extractables leached out of the deep well plates identified in this report depends on the...
Magritek, a leading provider of compact NMR and MRI instruments, report on the use of their Spinsolve Benchtop NMR spectrometer in the undergraduate teaching program at Long Beach City College under the leadership of Dr Marlon Jones.
Dr Marlon Jones is an Instructor of Chemistry in the Physical Science Department at Long Beach City College (LBCC). The College has served the community for more than eighty years through exceptional educational and student support services opportunities to help them succeed including moving on to full time university education. His teaching goals for the Organic Chemistry course at LBCC are to ensure that students have a fundamental understanding of the basic aspects of...
EATRIS, TIA, NCATS and CDRD join forces to share knowledge and insight
EATRIS ERIC, the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine, has joined forces with three major translational health research organisations to launch a global collaboration in the field of translational research in medicine. Therapeutic Innovation Australia (TIA), The Centre for Drug and Research Development (CDRD) in Canada and the US-based National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will be...
A leading UK supplier of early-stage drug discovery and development process services has improved the consistency and efficiency of its assays using VIAFLO II pipettes and a VIAFLO ASSIST from INTEGRA.
A senior scientist at the UK organisation commented “Our lab is extremely satisfied with the decision we made to purchase and incorporate INTEGRA’s VIAFLO II multichannel pipettes and the VIAFLO ASSIST pipetting assistant into our daily work. We use the VIAFLO ASSIST for automated multichannel pipetting applications including serial dilutions for a variety of assays such as ELISA’s and proliferation assays. For assays in which repeat dispensing is needed...
Genedata Expressionist® for Genomic Profiling helps Takara Bio to manage, process, and analyze large NGS datasets.
The investment in the Genedata platform underlines Takara Bio’s commitment to stay at the forefront of genomic research and to offer highest quality services to its customers. Genedata, a leading provider of advanced software solutions for drug discovery and life science research, today announced that Takara Bio Inc., a leading global biotechnology company, has chosen Genedata Expressionist for Genomic Profiling as its key software platform for next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. The platform will be integrated with in-house and third party data analysis tools and...
The use of pharmacometric modelling in predicting disease progression and optimizing clinical trial designs.
Treeway and LACDR at the University of Leiden join forces and form a collaboration focused on the optimization of clinical trial designs and data-analysis for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) through the use of population disease progression models. Furthermore both parties aim to obtain a better understanding of the disease by developing ALS physiology-based disease models and to test the effect of interventions in the different identified pathways...
The S-Lab 2015 Awards for Laboratory Good Practice and Innovation are now open, with a closing date of 12 January 2015.
The categories include design of new and refurbished laboratories, laboratory effectiveness, laboratory environmental improvement, laboratory informatics, and best new or improved laboratory product. The Awards will be presented in conjunction with the ‘Supporting World Class Science’ conference most likely to be held at the University of Bristol on June 16-17 2015. This provides a unique forum for key stakeholders such as science...
Horizon CombinatoRx to perform drug combination screening on lead oncology asset
Horizon Discovery Group plc (LSE:HZD) (Horizon), a leading provider of research tools to support translational genomics and the development of personalized medicines, today announced that its Horizon CombinatoRx division has been contracted by a top ten pharma company to profile a lead oncology asset. Under the terms of the agreement, Horizon CombinatoRx will be paid approximately USD $450,000 (GBP £276,000) for work to be completed within...
Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, through a partnership with New England Biolabs®, Inc. (NEB®), offers automated methods to improve processes and throughput in next generation sequencing (NGS) sample preparation.
Under the agreement, Beckman Coulter will use its extensive experience in automated NGS sample prep to develop, distribute and support automation for NEB’s NEBNext® sample preparation reagent kits. NEB will provide technical expertise on the reagents, chemistry and protocols. Fiona Stewart, Product Marketing Manager for Next Generation Sequencing at NEB said: “We are delighted to have formed this productive partnership with...
EATRIS Developed Collaboration to Accelerate the Validation of New Thyroid Cancer Diagnostic
Rosetta Genomics Ltd. (NASDAQ: ROSG), a leading developer and provider of microRNA-based molecular diagnostics, announces the initiation by the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine (EATRIS), of a new public-private translational research project between Rosetta Genomics and the Institute of Molecular Translational Medicine (IMTM) at Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. The new partnership will work towards the validation and development of a new thyroid cancer diagnostic tool. The partnership was facilitated by EATRIS’ new business model that...
Non-contact dispensing technologies such as acoustics will evolve into popular platforms for liquid handling, finds Frost & Sullivan
The escalating need for high throughput data is accelerating the shift towards automation in the Western European liquid handling market. Government investments in the development of bioclusters as well as research and development centres for various drug discovery applications are opening up opportunities for liquid handling companies in the region. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Western European Liquid Handling Market, finds that the...
The project is led by a consortium of three institutions based in Lyon, France: Imaxio, the VirPath laboratory at the Université Claude Bernard of Lyon and the International Center for Infectiology Research (CIRI)
The funding will accelerate the pre-clinical development of a candidate influenza vaccine with the aim of starting Phase I trials by 2017. Imaxio, a biopharmaceutical company specialized in vaccines, today announces that it has been awarded funding of EUR 600,000 (USD 772,000) by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR) for the OPTIVAC project 'leveraging On t-cell immune resPonse To Improve influenza VACcines'. The aim of the OPTIVAC project is to improve the efficacy of vaccines for seasonal influenza and current pandemics. To achieve this...
New awards to recognise excellence in UK Laboratories
GAMBICA and British Laboratory Managers Association patrons of UK Laboratory Excellence Awards
Awards Night scheduled for London, June 2015
Scientists and lab managers working in the UK’s laboratory sector will have a chance to gain recognition for their achievements in a new awards programme announced today. The UK Laboratory Excellence awards will open for entry on November 24th with 16 awards up for grabs including Laboratory of the Year and Laboratory Scientist of the Year. Tim Collins, Director, Laboratory Technology for GAMBICA said, ‘These new awards will shine a light on the central role that the laboratory plays in both the economy and the society as a whole....
Once again, as hospitals around the world are implementing Ebola preparedness protocols to deal with the outbreak safely and efficiently, the use of hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) for the decontamination of Ebola-exposed environments appears to be the preferred method.
A good example is Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in Georgia, USA, which has set up an Ebola website to share its procedures and protocols. The protocols reference HPV several times among other important steps of care. Bioquell’s 35% HPV system has already successfully been used in the USA, UK, France and the Netherlands for the disinfection of rooms or...
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has announced that a partnership led by the Medical Research Council (MRC) will invest over £230 million in a range of revolutionary technologies aimed at identifying the causes of diseases such as cancer and dementia, and dramatically speeding up diagnosis and treatment.
The state-of-the-art technologies will be used to find out how differences in the cellular and molecular make-up of people affect how they respond to diseases and to treatment. The Clinical Research Infrastructure Initiative will bring together funding from UK Government, devolved administrations, Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, to advance clinical research in 23 key projects at centres across the...
By Cindy Neeley, PhD., Field Applications Scientist, Labware & Speciality Plastics at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Since their introduction in the 80s, three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures have been employed by tissue engineers, cell biologists, and cancer and stem cell scientists, mostly at university research laboratories. The continuous development of materials and cell culture methodologies has enabled the establishment of cell culture conditions that more closely reproduce the environment found in vivo. The first 3D culture methods were cumbersome, time-consuming....
Read MoreNew Drug Could Help in Battle Against Cervical CancerNov 10, 2014
University of Leicester academic leads study into effects of cediranib drug in chemotherapy treatment of cervical cancer
In Europe only 20-30% of patients with recurrent or secondary cervical cancer have tumour shrinkage after conventional chemotherapy and life expectancy is usually less than one year. Study funded by Cancer Research UK shows adding investigational agent cediranib to standard chemotherapy might be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer. In Europe patients with recurrent or secondary cancer have a...
INTEGRA reports on how respiratory drug discovery and development specialists - Pulmocide Ltd. (London, UK) are using a VIAFLO Assist pipetting assistant to enhance the productivity and reproducibility of their screening of novel compounds in a range of biological assays.
Drawing upon its world-class drug discovery team - Pulmocide (www.pulmocide.com) is generating a pipeline of potent anti-infective agents for delivery by inhaled administration for the treatment of life threatening lower respiratory tract viral and fungal infections specifically RSV pneumonia and Invasive Aspergillosis. The lung is the principle site of infection for RSV and Aspergillus – delivery of highly effective new treatments directly to the lung will allow rapid control of infection with...
The Matrix Gemini LIMS from Autoscribe meets the requirements of highly regulated laboratories by providing audit trails, time and date stamping of all actions and version control of all reference data, such as test definitions.
This helps with compliance to any guidelines that require change control, validation and audit trailing of changes to stored data. Examples include cGLPs and cGMPs and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 in pharmaceutical companies, NELAC and ISO 17025 in water and food testing laboratories or NAMAS / UKAS regulations. With Matrix Gemini in use in a wide range of industries and applications, experts from Autoscribe are available to discuss in...
JPK Instruments reports on the use of their AFM system, the NanoWizard®, in the Nanobiosciences Group of the Institute of Physical & Theoretical Chemistry at the Technical University of Braunschweig.
It is being used to study DNA and DNA nanostructures. Dr Philip Tinnefeld is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig where he runs a laboratory which specialises in the field of NanoBioScience. His group has pioneered the integration of DNA origami with optical single-molecule spectroscopy over the last few years. In this context, they have demonstrated some of the early applications where the breakthroughs of...
Cleaning techniques and their efficacy against pathogens such as VRE, MERS and SARS are just some of the hot topics infection control professionals have been discussing at this year’s Infection Prevention Conference.
Right at the heart of these talks is hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) technology and best practices. Bioquell’s Senior Microbiologist, Jon Otter, has presented, along with two of his peers, a study which shows the capacity of pathogens like influenza, MERS and SARS to survive for days on dry surfaces. These can then be transferred from surfaces to hands. Facing this challenge they recommend that healthcare workers need to...
The Zetasizer Nano’s high performance electrophoretic light scattering capabilities are allowing researchers to better understand the nature of the electrostatic interactions between proteins and peptides. These measurements are crucial to developing bespoke cell culture platforms for the production of specific biologically significant hydrogel. By creating hydrogel structures based on the charge of target biomolecules, researchers at QMUL aim to...
The study, following on from an earlier study in 2005, gives data on a large range of microplates from numerous manufacturers based in Europe, USA and China. Mass spectral data shows that persistent contamination from a range of compounds found in the raw polymer master batch continues to be evident in many of the microplates tested. The effect of extractables leached out of the deep well plates identified in this report depends on the...
Dr Marlon Jones is an Instructor of Chemistry in the Physical Science Department at Long Beach City College (LBCC). The College has served the community for more than eighty years through exceptional educational and student support services opportunities to help them succeed including moving on to full time university education. His teaching goals for the Organic Chemistry course at LBCC are to ensure that students have a fundamental understanding of the basic aspects of...
EATRIS ERIC, the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine, has joined forces with three major translational health research organisations to launch a global collaboration in the field of translational research in medicine. Therapeutic Innovation Australia (TIA), The Centre for Drug and Research Development (CDRD) in Canada and the US-based National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will be...
A senior scientist at the UK organisation commented “Our lab is extremely satisfied with the decision we made to purchase and incorporate INTEGRA’s VIAFLO II multichannel pipettes and the VIAFLO ASSIST pipetting assistant into our daily work. We use the VIAFLO ASSIST for automated multichannel pipetting applications including serial dilutions for a variety of assays such as ELISA’s and proliferation assays. For assays in which repeat dispensing is needed...
The investment in the Genedata platform underlines Takara Bio’s commitment to stay at the forefront of genomic research and to offer highest quality services to its customers. Genedata, a leading provider of advanced software solutions for drug discovery and life science research, today announced that Takara Bio Inc., a leading global biotechnology company, has chosen Genedata Expressionist for Genomic Profiling as its key software platform for next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. The platform will be integrated with in-house and third party data analysis tools and...
Treeway and LACDR at the University of Leiden join forces and form a collaboration focused on the optimization of clinical trial designs and data-analysis for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) through the use of population disease progression models. Furthermore both parties aim to obtain a better understanding of the disease by developing ALS physiology-based disease models and to test the effect of interventions in the different identified pathways...
The categories include design of new and refurbished laboratories, laboratory effectiveness, laboratory environmental improvement, laboratory informatics, and best new or improved laboratory product. The Awards will be presented in conjunction with the ‘Supporting World Class Science’ conference most likely to be held at the University of Bristol on June 16-17 2015. This provides a unique forum for key stakeholders such as science...
Horizon Discovery Group plc (LSE:HZD) (Horizon), a leading provider of research tools to support translational genomics and the development of personalized medicines, today announced that its Horizon CombinatoRx division has been contracted by a top ten pharma company to profile a lead oncology asset. Under the terms of the agreement, Horizon CombinatoRx will be paid approximately USD $450,000 (GBP £276,000) for work to be completed within...
Under the agreement, Beckman Coulter will use its extensive experience in automated NGS sample prep to develop, distribute and support automation for NEB’s NEBNext® sample preparation reagent kits. NEB will provide technical expertise on the reagents, chemistry and protocols. Fiona Stewart, Product Marketing Manager for Next Generation Sequencing at NEB said: “We are delighted to have formed this productive partnership with...
Rosetta Genomics Ltd. (NASDAQ: ROSG), a leading developer and provider of microRNA-based molecular diagnostics, announces the initiation by the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine (EATRIS), of a new public-private translational research project between Rosetta Genomics and the Institute of Molecular Translational Medicine (IMTM) at Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. The new partnership will work towards the validation and development of a new thyroid cancer diagnostic tool. The partnership was facilitated by EATRIS’ new business model that...
The escalating need for high throughput data is accelerating the shift towards automation in the Western European liquid handling market. Government investments in the development of bioclusters as well as research and development centres for various drug discovery applications are opening up opportunities for liquid handling companies in the region. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Western European Liquid Handling Market, finds that the...
A good example is Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in Georgia, USA, which has set up an Ebola website to share its procedures and protocols. The protocols reference HPV several times among other important steps of care. Bioquell’s 35% HPV system has already successfully been used in the USA, UK, France and the Netherlands for the disinfection of rooms or...
The state-of-the-art technologies will be used to find out how differences in the cellular and molecular make-up of people affect how they respond to diseases and to treatment. The Clinical Research Infrastructure Initiative will bring together funding from UK Government, devolved administrations, Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, to advance clinical research in 23 key projects at centres across the...
Since their introduction in the 80s, three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures have been employed by tissue engineers, cell biologists, and cancer and stem cell scientists, mostly at university research laboratories. The continuous development of materials and cell culture methodologies has enabled the establishment of cell culture conditions that more closely reproduce the environment found in vivo. The first 3D culture methods were cumbersome, time-consuming....
In Europe only 20-30% of patients with recurrent or secondary cervical cancer have tumour shrinkage after conventional chemotherapy and life expectancy is usually less than one year. Study funded by Cancer Research UK shows adding investigational agent cediranib to standard chemotherapy might be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer. In Europe patients with recurrent or secondary cancer have a...
Drawing upon its world-class drug discovery team - Pulmocide (www.pulmocide.com) is generating a pipeline of potent anti-infective agents for delivery by inhaled administration for the treatment of life threatening lower respiratory tract viral and fungal infections specifically RSV pneumonia and Invasive Aspergillosis. The lung is the principle site of infection for RSV and Aspergillus – delivery of highly effective new treatments directly to the lung will allow rapid control of infection with...
This helps with compliance to any guidelines that require change control, validation and audit trailing of changes to stored data. Examples include cGLPs and cGMPs and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 in pharmaceutical companies, NELAC and ISO 17025 in water and food testing laboratories or NAMAS / UKAS regulations. With Matrix Gemini in use in a wide range of industries and applications, experts from Autoscribe are available to discuss in...
It is being used to study DNA and DNA nanostructures. Dr Philip Tinnefeld is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the Technische Universität Braunschweig where he runs a laboratory which specialises in the field of NanoBioScience. His group has pioneered the integration of DNA origami with optical single-molecule spectroscopy over the last few years. In this context, they have demonstrated some of the early applications where the breakthroughs of...