Customer Stories

The significant drop in leprosy worldwide is attributed to the development of antimicrobial multidrug therapy (MDT). Resistance to rifampicin — the backbone of MDT treatment — has appeared. Controlling leprosy transmission requires routine surveillance for mutations in the drug target genes before, during, and after the course of treatment. New high resolution melt (HRM) assays offer leprosy researchers a faster, more economical method to investigate resistance targets.

Dr Hunseok Lee has known since childhood that he wanted to grow up to become a scientist. “You get to wear white gowns, look through a microscope at various substances so small they can’t be seen by the naked eye — those things were very attractive to me when I was young,” says Lee. But the realities of putting research into practice and translating ideas into experiments have proven far more strenuous than the young Lee anticipated.

Identifying Cardiac Defect–Related Protein SignaturesAugust 15, 2011 “The first opportunity I had to lay my hand on a human heart I knew that was that — I knew that I wanted to know how the heart works, but more importantly, how it doesn’t work,” says Dr Francis Spinale, describing his inspiration to both research and treat cardiac disease. Using the Bio-Plex® suspension array system, researchers in his laboratory are discovering protein signatures that have the potential to inform decision strategies in cardiac patient treatment.

Dr. Steven Kornblau has been on faculty at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, for 20 years, where he divides his time between research into further understanding leukemia disease states, and a clinical practice where he treats a small number of patients with the disease. Recently, his laboratory used the Bio-Plex® suspension array system to discover how cytokine and chemokine profiles alone can be prognostic for patients with the disease, and therefore have to potential to assist development of personalized treatments.

Bedtime stories in Dr David Schaffer’s — one of today’s pioneers in stem cell research — childhood home were often not standard fairy tales. With both parents in careers as biomedical researchers (his mother in drug development and clinical trials for a major pharmaceutical company and his father, in cardiovascular research and a pharmacology professor) much of the conversation as far back as Schaffer can remember centered on biology and science.