Research Areas

Thermo Electron Corp. announced in early August it had acquired Ottawa-based Ionalytics Corp. whose key technology is an ion filtering device used with mass spectrometers in bioanalysis, proteomics and drug discovery. The purchase comes amid Thermo’s continued bolstering of its LC-MS portfolio, that has also included the recent release of the LTQ Orbitrap at ASMS in June.

Corporate profits are certainly a major impetus for U.S. Genomics’ new Direct Results fee-for-service program, but there is another side as well: The goal of encouraging more scientists to count individual molecules of microRNA (miRNA) in samples.

Biopharmaceutical company Genelabs Technologies announced it was advancing two of its drug discovery projects for testing as possible therapeutics against Hepatitis C virus (HCV). The compounds are part of a multi-pronged attack that relies on nucleoside- and non-nucleoside-based approaches.

Unlocking the secrets of the human proteome is the goal. Some of the keys to get those secrets into the open may rest at Swedish company Affibody AB, which along with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies has entered into a cooperative agreement to develop advanced protein sample preparation solutions for human biomarker discovery.

University of Cin-cinnati scientists have discovered how blood-regenerating stem cells move from bone marrow into the blood stream. This finding, in turn, has led to the development of a new chemical compound that can accelerate the process of stem cell mobilization in mice—a technique that could eventually lead to more efficient stem cell harvesting for human use and potential therapeutics.

With the publication of the August 9 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientific community got a sneak peek of a discovery at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), that led to the development of what are being referred to as smart bio-nanotubes.

Solvay Pharmaceuticals recently announced an agreement to collaborate with the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research to investigate a novel mechanism of action to treat gastrointestinal motility disorders.

CuraGen subsidiary 454 Life Sciences recently announced the publication of a new method it developed for high-throughput, high-accuracy DNA sequencing that should open the door to widespread, cost-effective genomics efforts. The new method, which can sequence genomes 100 times faster than the more traditional Sanger method, was described in a paper published in Nature.

NeoRx in August became the first biotechnology company to enter into a research alliance with Scripps Florida, the newly established Palm Beach County, Fla., division of La Jolla, Calif.-based Scripps Research. The focus of this collaboration is on discovering novel, small-molecule, multi-targeted, protein kinase inhibitors as therapeutic agents, such as those needed for cancer treatment.

Tra-ditionally, the Texas A&M University system’s health sciences program hasn’t exactly been a darling in terms of getting research grants, particularly from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But the university aims to change that with the founding of the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM).