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- June 2013
Novel Technologies News for June 2013
In chemical reactions left and right can make a big difference. A "left-handed" molecule of a particular chemical composition could be an effective drug, while its mirror-image "right-handed" counterpart could be completely inactive. That's because, in biology, "left" and "right" molecular designs are crucial: living organisms are made only from left-handed amino acids. So telling the two apart is important-but difficult.
28 June, 2013
Scientists have discovered the survival secret to a genetic mutation that stokes leukemia cells, solving an evolutionary riddle and paving the way to a highly targeted therapy for leukemia. In a paper published in Cell, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center describe how a mutated protein, called Fbxw7, behaves differently when expressed in cancer cells versus healthy cells.
24 June, 2013
Recent research suggests that antibiotics can stimulate their own production. Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have demonstrated that an antibiotic produced by a soil bacterium can increase its own synthesis under certain conditions, a finding which may hold promise for dramatically increasing the efficiency of antibiotic manufacture.
19 June, 2013
The scientific cooperation between chemists, biotechnologists and physicists from various Catalan institutes, headed by Pau Gorostiza, from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and Ernest Giralt, from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), has led to a breakthrough that will favor the development of light-regulated therapeutic molecules.
19 June, 2013
Optibrium, a developer of software for drug discovery, today announced the release of version 5.4 of its StarDrop™ software platform. This new release offers enhanced features to guide the design of novel, safe and efficacious drugs by providing access to world-leading technologies for toxicity prediction and bioisosteric transformations. These new optional modules further extend StarDrop’s capabilities to intuitively target high quality compounds in drug discovery, reducing the time and cost to deliver drug candidates with an improved chance of success.
11 June, 2013
A national research facility has opened which will put the UK at the forefront of a revolution in health and medical research. The MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre will examine around one hundred thousand blood and urine samples every year. It will analyse phenomes – the biological results of people's genes and environment – to help determine the causes of disease and indicate how treatments can be tailored for individual patients.
10 June, 2013
UK biotechnology company Retrogenix announces that its unique human cell microarray technology played a pivotal role in determining the molecular interaction that triggers severe malaria in children. The discovery, reported this week in Nature, could lead to new therapies to combat a form of the disease that kills around one million children per year.
06 June, 2013
Cancer Research UK and its commercial arm, Cancer Research Technology (CRT), have joined forces with Abcodia, the biomarker validation company with a focus on cancer screening, to develop new blood tests to detect a range of cancers when they are still at a very early stage.
06 June, 2013