I will begin posting links to interesting scientific articles from this location in my website. 

 

There are some great new technologies for discovering and characterizing drugs, and this blog will focus on some of the recent scientific advances that will help bring new drugs to market. 

 

One recently developed technology is referred to as "cellular dielectric spectroscopy", and has been brought to market recently by MDS Sciex.  The technology is an outgrowth of work originally done by Signature Biosciences, and is a practical application of technologies that had their inception at Stanford University (where the original work was known as "microwave coupling sprectroscopy".

 

Another interesting technology, also from Stanford, comes from the laboratory of Dr. Garry Nolan.  His group has pushed the limits of polychromatic flow cytometry.  Omar Perez, in Garry's group, has applied polychromatic flow cytometry to study signal transduction, at the cellular level.  By coupling the power of flow cytometry to look at thousands of cells per second individually, Omar Perez and others in Garry's group can 1) identify specific cell types and 2) quantify the activation state of specific cellular signaling pathways.  This is a powerful capability with many applications in drug discovery and development (more on this in the days to come!).  Combined with Bayesian analysis, they are able to use this information to identify new, previously unknown, members of signaling pathways (ie. they can find a "black box" that controls or influences the behavior of members of the signaling pathway, without even having a means to observe the "black box" directly.  This is a powerful approach to identify new targets for drug discovery. 

 

I will attempt to illuminate some of these interesting new technologies on this blog in the days to come...

 

Richard Mitchell