Dr Tosh believes liver tissue produced from converted pancreas cells may also be useful to the pharmaceuticals industry for use in drug screening.
Typical drug-screening software can handle fewer than a million compounds a day.
Symyx got its start in 1994, the brainchild of Peter Schultz, a chemist who several years earlier at the University of California, Berkeley hit on the idea of applying the techniques of rapid drug-screening to materials science.
FORBES: Upstart Symyx is shaking up the stodgy chemicals industry.
Faster screening of drug candidates helps you develop new hypotheses.
In recent years Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and other drug giants have moved away from screening natural compounds, which is unpredictable and labor intensive, in favor of automation.
Geron and GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric, are developing and commercializing cellular assay products derived from human embryonic stem cells for use in drug discovery, development and toxicity screening.
General Electric ( GE - news - people ), are developing and commercializing cellular assay products derived from human embryonic stem cells for use in drug discovery, development and toxicity screening.
After screening dredges up a promising drug candidate, combinatorial chemistry takes a hand.
In partnership with the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (Sulsa), the University of Dundee will place a team of drug discovery scientists at BioCity to conduct screening and medicinal chemistry activities for the project.
This method of testing new drug ideas against many thousand compounds - High Throughput Screening (HTS) - is likened to searching for a very small needle in a very large haystack.
In 2003, the NABP wrote a letter to Google warning about advertising from online drug outlets that weren't verified by a NABP screening program.
Because of the indirect mechanism of its toxicity and its specificity for human cells, the contaminant had been undetectable in both the standard, sophisticated screening tests that are supposed to assure a drug's purity and quality, and in studies in animals.
Among biotechs Celgene is a throwback to a time when drug discovery was based more on chemistry and serendipity than on computerized genetic screening methods.
At the laboratory of Aurora, a San Diego-based firm specializing in such mass screening, little needles squirt a billionth of a liter of a potential drug into 3, 456 millimeter-wide wells. (The squirters come from another silicon-based business: ink-jet printers.) In the wells are biologically interesting molecules, such as enzymes, or cells that may present targets to new medicines.
Good screening programmes in the Bahamas have helped to slow the infection rate, and drug treatments there and in Barbados that help to prevent pregnant mothers passing the disease to their children have been copied elsewhere.
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