On 29 November 2018, Matthew Smonskey (senior scientist in the Gibco Custom Media Services team at Thermo Fisher Scientific) presented an “Ask the Expert†webinar on resources available to help developers identify media limitations and options for designing custom media formulations that maximize protein yield. Smonskey’s Presentation Gibco’s goal is to solve its clients’ bioproduction problems: e.g., creating a chemically defined medium, increasing end-point titer, modifying protein quality attributes, and so on. Designing custom media using spent-media analysis might solve…
Monday, February 11, 2019 Daily Archives
Ask the Expert: A Modular Chromatography Platform with a Lattice-Supported Bed
In an Ask-the-Expert webinar on 4 December 2018, Jason Chiu (product marketing scientist at JSR Life Sciences) introduced the Chromassette chromatography cassette platform. This stackable, modular technology and resin-support device presents a productive and disposable process that can scale to any volume using any resin. An internal scaffold provides a uniquely supported resin bed, and the system is fully interchangeable with conventional column formats. Chiu’s Presentation The Chromassette platform offers linear scalability, superior pressure-flow properties, high-productivity separations, and rapid and…
Elucidation: Better Biomarkers Could Power Precision Medicine for Autoimmune Disease
Precision medicine has long been a tantalizing goal for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Fields such as oncology and rare diseases have benefited greatly from implementation of genome-guided care. Drug developers likewise have made strides with biomarker-aided discovery programs and stratification for clinical trials. Current indications suggest that autoimmune diseases will be the next major focus of personalized medicine. The goal of precision medicine often is described as “getting the right drug to the right patient at the right time. 
VBAs and marketing campaign to aid RNAi Onpattro ramp up, says Alnylam
Around 200 patients have so far been treated with Onpattro (patisiran), the first approved RNA interference (RNAi) drug, bringing in $12.5 million for Alnylam. In August 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Commission (EC) approved Alnylam Pharmaceuticals’ Onpattro for the treatment of the polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated (hATTR) amyloidosis in adults. The approvals heralded in a new class of drugs: small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA) treatments. Onpattro works by silencing a portion of RNA involved…