General Interest

Successful chimeric antigen receptor- (CAR-) T cell therapy requires a target antigen that is unique to cancer cells. But what happens when there are no unique antigens? Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center addressed this problem by replacing healthy non-target cells with genetically modified versions lacking the CAR-T cell target. Their results, published in PNAS, may provide a new avenue for treatment of some types of cancer.

A recent publication showed that expression of a protein involved in homology-directed repair (HDR) can improve efficiency of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Learn how manipulation of DNA repair pathways and improvements to gene editing workflows, such as the addition of cell sorting, can facilitate applications of CRISPR-Cas9 technology.

In an effort to increase the return on investment of research and development, pharmaceutical companies are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs. One way to do this is to incorporate technology and minimize human interaction. As a result, scientists will have more time to focus on the design and analysis of experiments. How will the Lab of the Future reflect these changes?

Drug discovery and development are both time and resource intensive since a lot of different compounds need to be screened across a lot of different targets. See how machine learning models can be used to predict screening results and how active learning algorithms can be used to efficiently select which experiments to perform in order to build those models.

Over the past several decades, research informatics (RIS) environments within BioPharma organizations have evolved dramatically, increasing the demand for simple and easy data integration and visualization. Learn about the tools available to address this need and what the future could hold.

Artificial intelligence (AI) relies on building a model and applying it to solve a specific problem. Read how AI is being used to accelerate research and development, process development, manufacturing, and clinical trials within genomics.

Many BioPharma organizations are moving to the cloud in order to improve the performance and speed, cost, physical and personnel resources, security, back up, and sharing/collaboration associated with large, complex datasets. Learn about the different strategies used in migrating to the cloud.

Passive reference dyes are included in qPCR/RT-qPCR supermixes to compensate for pipetting errors and thermal and/or optical differences in real-time instruments. Our universal line of reagents eliminates the need for spiking in dyes or having to worry about how much ROX your instrument needs. See how your qPCR experiments can also generate more reliable data and be reproducible by anyone.

Normalization of western blot data is very crucial in quantitating proteins. Normalization of band intensity of proteins of interest with the band intensity of housekeeping proteins (HKP) is routinely done in labs. But more and more journals question the validity of using HKPs in normalization and are demanding more validations and tests. An alternative method is to use total protein normalization (TPN) for normalization. Explore the TPN option and see how you can get reliable western blot data easily.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world and, due to an aging population, more and more people are diagnosed with cancer every year. Researchers are actively searching for treatment options in the form of potential biomarkers. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have piqued the interest of researchers as a relatively new source of therapeutics. Learn more about lncRNAs and see how they can be used in cancer diagnosis and intervention.