Research Areas

In early June, I had the pleasure of attending the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences (CSPS) in Toronto; an intimate meeting of a couple hundred mostly Canadian researchers and company administrators who spent three days discussing the technical and regulatory challenges of performing drug discovery science both in Canada and in general. While topics ranged from structural genomics and outsourcing to regulatory issues and processing, one subject continued to resonate throughout the meeting: microdosing.

Antibody specialist Ablynx recently announced an R&D and licensing deal with the National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Biological Sciences (NRC-IBS), based in Ottawa.

The Blueprint Initiative Asia recently introduced directed data curation services that are designed to deliver to clients defined biomolecular interaction data to facilitate scientific research efforts. These curation services are expected to help scientists identify important biological molecules and complexes, such as drug targets, diagnostic biomarkers, and metabolic processes critical to healthcare.

Drug discovery informatics provider Tripos Inc. announced plans last month to embrace web services as a key strategic component of its informatics products and future product development strategy.

Waters Corp. and Munich, Germany-based InfoChem GmbH announced last month that Waters would include InfoChem’s reaction search technology based on Chemistry Cartridge in future generations of its eLab Notebook software.

Data pipeline and workflow tools company SciTegic and Tripos Inc. announced in late June that Tripos joined SciTegic’s independent software vendor (ISV) partner program to provide software compatibility between their product lines.

Late last month, Upstate Group, a division of Serologicals Corp., and CXR Biosciences announced the two companies would work together to create an early-stage toxicology screening platform the companies believe will allow for more effective screening of drug candidate compounds.

In a deal expected to close earlier this month, Agilent Technologies recently announced it signed a merger agreement with scientific information management company Scientific Software Inc. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

BioPhysics Assay Laboratory (BioPAL) announced in mid-June that the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health had awarded the company a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.

Applied Biosystems Inc. and San Diego-based Invitrogen announced in early June a marketing alliance that will offer a suite of labeling products for proteomics researchers that includes Applied Bio’s ITRAQ and ICAT reagents and Invitrogen’s newly-released metabolomic labeling technology SILAC.