Research has shown that taking cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins--such as Pfizer 's (nyse: PFE - news - people ) Lipitor and Merck 's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) Zocor--significantly reduce the enzyme measured by the PLAC test.

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The synthetic collagen appears to be just like the collagen found in humans, as an initial test indicated that an enzyme that breaks down collagen in the body also breaks down the synthetic collagen.

FORBES: Researchers Create Synthetic Collagen

To prove the importance of the JAK pathway, someone needed to discover a compound to test the hypothesis that inhibiting the JAK enzyme was of value in treating disease.

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Just one square inch, the chip contains 2, 056 microvalves that can selectively mix reagents together (in this case to test for the activity of a particular enzyme in a bacterium) in 256 reaction chambers, each one holding less than one-billionth of a liter of fluorescent dye.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Researchers can only use dead cells or pieces of a cell and can only test for one response at a time, such as enzyme activity or the binding of a compound to a receptor.

FORBES: Laser light shows

To be specific, Merck (MRK) will test a beta-amyloid precursor protein site-cleaving enzyme, or BACE, inhibitor, which the drugmaker notes is the first drug with this type of mechanism to advance to this stage of clinical research.

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And the machines can only test for one event at a time--say, monitoring one enzyme's activity or seeing if a compound binds to a target on a cell.

FORBES: Cellular Home Movies

The CHMP was also concerned by liver test results in patients taking Kynamro showing a build-up of fat in the liver and increased enzyme levels, and was not convinced that the company had proposed sufficient measures to prevent the risk of irreversible liver damage.

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