Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Nuclea Biotechnologies and Thermo Fisher Scientific said today that they are collaborating on multiplexed mass spec assays for quantifying native insulin and its therapeutic analogs. Nuclea plans to use the assays to analyze patient samples as part of the company's diabetes research collaborations. The assays will be developed at Thermo Fisher's Biomarker Research Initiatives in Mass Spectrometry (BRIMS) Center and will be run using Thermo Fisher's MSIA immunoenrichment technology and its TSQ Vantage or Quantiva mass spec instruments. "We’ve already worked with the BRIMS Center to develop two other very important assays," Nuclea CEO Patrick Muraca said in a statement. "These assays have demonstrated the sensitivity, precision, and robustness needed for high-throughput detection of clinically relevant isoforms of target proteins." "The real-world application of multiplexed MS-based methods to type 2 diabetes presents an opportunity to advance ...

Aileron Therapeutics and Roche announced today that they have entered into a collaboration to discover, develop and commercialise a new class of drugs called Stapled Peptide Therapeutics. As part of this agreement, Roche will work with Aileron to develop drug candidates against up to five undisclosed targets selected from Roche’s key therapeutic areas, which include oncology, virology, inflammation, metabolism and CNS. Stapled Peptide Therapeutics are a result of Aileron’s breakthrough peptide stabilization technology, and are a potential solution to drug as-yet intractable disease targets, including those originating from long sought-after intracellular protein-protein interactions. Under the terms of the agreement, Roche will provide Aileron guaranteed funding of at least $25 million in technology access fees and R&D support. Aileron is eligible to receive up to $1.1 billion in payments upon the achievement of discovery, development, regulatory and commercialisation milesto...

The Alzheimer Research Forum ( http://www.alzforum.org ), a dynamic, biomedical Web community that is heavily used by Alzheimer researchers around the world, is preparing to migrate to a new platform that will enable it to more fully exploit social networking (" Web 2.0 ") and the Semantic Web ("Web 3.0"). Founded 13 years ago when the Web was still in its infancy, the "Alzforum" has more than 5,000 registered members and is familiar to most Alzheimer scientists in the world. Ever since launching in 1996, the Alzforum Web site has been interactive, posting researchers' comments on published papers and research news. The site has published thousands of peer commentaries and mini-reviews by leading scientists in the field, and has established itself as the "go to" Web site for anyone who wished to be up to date on Alzheimer research. Members can post commentaries on any journal article or news story, and can participate in live discussion for...

Biomedical Data mining happens to be a long-standing problem in scientific research. Scientists are constantly in search of newer and innovative means to mine biomedical data. Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service , that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and ...

XTractor now has over Over 150 registered users from FDA , NIH , NCI , Astra Zeneca , Wyeth , MD Anderson Cancer Institute , Washington university , Scripps institute , Max Planck , Harvard Medical school and many more in less than 3 weeks !!! More than 600 annotated facts added everyday. A total of 25,000 facts added till date!!! Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service , that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could the...