Developing new vaccines to protect against diseases that plague humans is fraught with numerous challenges—one being that microbes tend to vary how they look on the surface to avoid being identified and destroyed by the immune system. However, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have more

Recent public health efforts have focused extensively on reducing the amount of formula babies are given in the hospital after birth. But in the first randomized trial of its kind, researchers at UC San Francisco have found that giving small amounts of formula in the first few days of life to infant more

Scientists from the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) have discovered why a particular cancer drug is so effective at killing cells. Their findings could be used to aid the design of future cancer treatments. Professor Daniel Davis and his team used high quality video more

Immune system B cells play a crucial role in the defence of pathogens; when they detect such an intruder, they produce antibodies that help to combat the enemy. They concurrently and continuously improve these molecules to more precisely recognize the pathogens. A team of scientists with participati more

Ablynx and Spirogen Ltd. announced a research collaboration to evaluate the potential of a novel anti-cancer drug conjugate combining Spirogen's proprietary cytotoxic drugs, pyrrolobenzodiazepines (PBD), and associated linker technology, with Nanobodies® generated using Ablynx’s proprietary technolo more

The efficiency of antibody molecules is dependent on their stability. We introduce an assay setup where stability of antibodies is measured. Shaking stress is initiated by the FLUOstar Omega microplate reader and aggregation propensity of antibody candidates is measured in 96-well format more

Biomarkers are currently changing the way we diagnose and treat diseases. Today pharmacodynamic biomarkers are widely used in the industry elaborating optimal dosing of new drugs and predictive biomarkers have an enormous potential for companion diagnostics more

Each antibody-antigen interaction has unique characteristics. A protocol giving good results for one antibody-antigen pair might found to be unsatisfactory for a second antibody even on the same sample. The interaction of antisera with protein epitopes in Western blot dependens upon a number of factors, all contributing to the final signal/noise ratio. Knowledge and control of those factors allows for modifications and optimization of the procedure. Polyclonal antibodies (serum or IgY-fractions from egg yolk) usually contain a number of different antibodies interacting independently with different epitopes on the target used for immunization. This number is limited for peptide-antigens but if recombinant or native proteins have been used for immunization the signal obtained has to be regarded as cumulative (=caused by several different types of antibodies present in the serum/IgY used) more

As demonstrated here, there are a broad range of HPLC applications used in development, production, validation and release of protein therapeutics for human use. Some of the applications mentioned above are mandatory when submitting a new biopharmaceutical to approval at the regulatory agencies. The introduction of the first so-called biosimilars in Europe further increased the demand for highly efficient analysis methods. The continuous development of new stationary phases for the common modes of biochromatography, such as size exclusion, ion exchange and hydrophilic interaction chromatography support biochemists in increasing lab productivity and establishing high-throughput HPLC analysis not only for small molecules but also for large biopolymers more

FuGENE® HD Transfection Reagent is well-suited for studying the impact of apoptosis-inducing proteins such as bax. Transfection with FuGENE® HD Transfection Reagent produced only minimal cytotoxic side effects while maintaining a high transfection efficiency. In contrast, cytotoxicity, and off-target effects of the other commercially available transfection reagents tested made it impossible to distinguish the impact of the bax protein from the impact of the transfection reagent itself more