Internal Medicine

The commercial microarray industry is a little over a decade old. While gene expression studies are still a mainstay in the search for blockbuster drugs and novel biomarkers, this is a good time to look at some of the emerging trends that are changing the face of microarray research. When combined with gene expression analysis, these new applications can play a crucial role in unraveling complex molecular pathways.

Biomolecular technology and pharmaceutical company Odyssey Thera announced recently it had signed an agreement to provide the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) with a cell-based compound screening system that will be used to further the NIH Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. The technology, protein-fragment complementation assay (PCA), will allow NCGC to screen human cell lines for the impact of potential drugs on biochemical pathways. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

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.

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.

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).

LONDON—Sales of bioinformatics tools in Europe hit $310 million in 2004 and are forecast to more than double to $720 million by 2011.

RegeneRx Biophar-maceuticals reported in early August that it had begun a collaboration with the Division of Cardiology at Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C., to study thymosin beta 4 (TB4). The goal is to explore TB4’s ability to treat degenerative muscle diseases that often result in cardiomyopathy—a progressive deterioration and weakening of the heart.

Every so often, it is good for us to challenge the so-called truths that we hold dear, for it is often our defense of these truths that keep us from seeing the advantages around the corner. Until Stanley Prusiner and colleagues elucidated the mechanism of prion replication, few of us could conceive of an infectious disease that could propagate without a nucleic acid intermediate. Thalidomide offers a particularly special example of being a wonder drug that was vilified when its use as an anti-nauseate was linked to birth defects. And yet later still, it has seen a renaissanceas scientists have begun to use it as an effective treatment for cancer when proper precautions are followed.

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.