Mega docking library poised to speed drug discovery

One billion-plus compounds - weeded of 'decoys' - expected by 2020

08-Feb-2019 - Researchers have launched an ultra-large virtual docking library expected to grow to more than 1 billion molecules by next year. It will expand by 1000-fold the number of such "make-on-demand" compounds readily available to scientists for chemical biology and drug discovery. The larger the ...

Utilizing CRISPR for better antibiotics

Drug screening with Mobile-CRISPRi

15-Jan-2019 - A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and his collaborators at the University of California, San Francisco have repurposed the gene-editing tool CRISPR to study which genes are targeted by particular antibiotics, providing clues on how to improve existing antibiotics or develop new ...

How fatal biofilms form

09-Oct-2018 - By severely curtailing the effects of antibiotics, the formation of organized communities of bacterial cells known as biofilms can be deadly during surgeries and in urinary tract infections. Yale researchers have just come a lot closer to understanding how these biofilms develop, and potentially ...

First-of-its-kind biofabrication research lab opens at University of Illinois

03-Jul-2018 - Enabled by a generous gift from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust , the BioMaker Lab at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Lab (MRL) will be the first state-of-the-art interdisciplinary biofabrication hub in the world. This new facility will enable non-specialists and specialists alike from ...

Shooting the achilles heel of nervous system cancers

24-Jul-2017 - Virtually all cancer treatments used today also damage normal cells, causing the toxic side effects associated with cancer treatment. A cooperative research team led by researchers at Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center devised a strategy to target cancer cells while sparing normal cells. ...

Organs-on-chips for large-scale drug screening

09-Feb-2017 - Led by UCI professor of molecular biology & biochemistry Christopher C.W. Hughes, the research team successfully established multiple vascularized micro-organs on an industry-standard 96-well plate. Hughes and the study's first author, Duc T. T. Phan, showed that these miniature tissues are much ...

A step forward in building functional human tissues

13-Oct-2016 - Toward the ultimate goal of engineering human tissues and organs that can mimic native function for use in drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine, a Wyss Institute team led by Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., has made another foundational advance using ...

DNA-guided 3-D printing of human tissue is unveiled

Technique produces 'organoids' useful in cancer research, drug screening

02-Sep-2015 - A UCSF-led team has developed a technique to build tiny models of human tissues, called organoids, more precisely than ever before using a process that turns human cells into a biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. These mini-tissues in a dish can be used to study how particular structural ...

High-throughput drug screening in 3D

06-Nov-2013 - Scientists in China have developed a simple microchip that enables quick and inexpensive high-throughput screening of potential drug candidates in 3D cell cultures. Scientists often use cell-based high-throughput screening in the first stage of drug design as a technique to quickly identify the ...

New insights into how stem cells determine what tissue to become

03-Aug-2010 - Within 24 hours of culturing adult human stem cells on a new type of matrix, University of Michigan researchers were able to make predictions about how the cells would differentiate, or what type of tissue they would become. Their results are published in the Aug. 1 edition of Nature ...