Research Areas

Pharma is unlike any other industry; pass it on Imust admit to wondering sometimes why anyone in his or her right mind would even consider a career in the pharmaceutical industry.

The conventional approaches used to discover biomarkers that can be used to help us understand disease and assay for its presence or response to drug treatment represent a wonderful start. They involve looking at differential biology at the protein level and trying to see if there are changes, racing to sequence all of the changes, and then going back to the literature or reconciling with one’s own hypotheses to choose which of the changed proteins are really relevant to the clinical question you are asking. Whatever the clinical question, whether it is detection of disease, determining the likelihood of response or an adverse reaction to a drug, you have to choose the right biomarkers and then build reproducible, precise assays.

Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) and Thar Technologies announced an integration of their chromatography data systems to provide “efficient chiral application screening and databasing” to the pharmaceutical development process. According to Michael McBrien, ACD/Labs chromatography software product manager, the new system joins Thar’s SuperChrom software to the ACD/ChromManager, providing customers with complete front- and back-end chromatography support.

SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development organization, announced in July the expansion of its BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases from 18 to 160 organisms. SRI collaborated with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in enlarging the collection to include databases for most eukaryotic and prokaryotic species whose genomes have been sequenced.

Biosystems Informatics Institute (Bii) recently announced an alliance with Cleveland, Ohio-based Lucidyx. Through this alliance, Bii will assist Lucidyx in the development of new bioinformatics tools that are intended to integrate data storage and Lucidyx’s genomic search engine technology.

In response to the growing need for more robust data capture and data tracking for bio banks, LabVantage Solutions Inc. rolled out in late spring the Sapphire BioBanking Solution, which it built in conjunction with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, the original developers of the Spectrum repository management tool.

Qiagen N.V. continued its recent acquisition spree, in June and earlier this month, with the acquisition of three companies whose products filled holes in the company’s pre-analytical sample preparation line. The late June purchase of Montreal-based Nextal Biotechnologies provides a foothold in the protein crystallography market, while the combination of recent acquisitions of SuNyx GmbH and LumiCyte Inc. address sample prep in the MALDI market.

Becton, Dickinson and Co. (BD) announced last month that it has signed an agreement to sell the Clontech operation, a unit of the company’s BD Biosciences division, to Otsu, Japan-based Takara Bio.

Mass spectrometry specialist Accium BioSciences and clinical research company Radiant Research recently announced the signing of a co-marketing agreement that will see the two companies combine their expertise in microdosing or Phase 0 analysis to provide more extensive clinical services worldwide. The partnership will effectively see the two companies become a one-stop shop in the growing area of pre-clinical and early clinical pharmacokinetics (PK) testing.

Applied Biosystems Group recently launched its expanded polymerase chain reaction (PCR) licensing program, and announced in early July that the first licensee in this program would be Carlsbad, Calif.-based Invitrogen Corp. Financial terms of the license were not disclosed.