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 ...

In this article, in the first part, we propose an artificial neural network-based intelligent technique to determine the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) among known aldose reductase inhibitors (ARIs) for diabetes mellitus using two molecular descriptors, i.e., the electronegativity and molar volume of functional groups present in the main ARI lead structure. We have shown that the multilayer perceptron-based model is capable of determining the QSAR quite satisfactorily, with high  R -value. Usually, the design of potent ARIs requires the use of complex computer docking and quantum mechanical (QM) steps involving excessive time and human judgement. In the second part of this article, to reduce the design cycle of potent ARIs, we propose a novel ANN technique to eliminate the computer docking and QM steps, to predict the total score. The MLP-based QSAR models obtained in the first part are used to predict the potent ARIs, using the experimental data reported by Hu...