Drug discovery is an expensive and a long term process. Though, the technology for drug screening is evolving everyday but only very limited number of drug candidates qualify for the final screening and get approved by FDA. We can see a drastic decline in new drug candidates in the past few years. This is mainly due to the low efficacy and toxicity of the drug on human system.
Categories:
Drug Discovery
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The existence of cancer stem cells have started as a hypothesis and followed by enormous number of experimental evidences. Still, a large number of scientists in stem cell areas and other research areas are very skeptical about the existence of cancer stem cells. We can believe the existence of cancer stem cells and its role in cancer from all the reported studies on the isolation/characterization of cancer stem cells in various cancers such as leukemia, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, colon cancer etc from past and ongoing research on cancer stem cell. The PubMed searches on cancer stem cells showed more than 5000 articles as of October 2009 and this data indicates that the first research article on cancer stem was published on 1976 (see the box to see all the PubMEd search results). It is evident that the concept of cancer stem is known to us for more than 23 years. If the scientist would have accepted the existence of cancer stem cells a decade ago, possibly we would have been in a better position in finding a cure for cancer or may be closer to achieve this goal? May be the concept of stem cells were not established at that time?
Categories:
Stem Cells
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Considerable efforts have been made to develop tools for the absolute quantitation of peptide/protein using mass spectrometry (MS). Proteomics researchers are so fascinated with the concept of absolute quantiatation and they are spending enormous amount of time for developing tools or optimizing methods for the absolute quantitation of proteins in a cell or tissue or organ. These experiments and technology development efforts not only take lot of time but also involve huge capital investment. The question is, whether it is worth spending so much money in these efforts? The arguments for justifying such studies are that it is necessary to understand the absolute quantity of a protein for quantitative proteomics. This will enable us to quantitate exact amount of toxins in food/environment, biomarker proteins and drug target proteins and so on. It looks very reasonable to measure the exact quantity of a disease biomarker or Staphylococcal enterotoxins in various foods.
Categories:
Proteomics
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In recent years open innovation has become a buzz word for big and small business enterprises, and in course of time several open innovation service companies have evolved to help with open innovation for big companies. The term "open innovation" is coined by Henry Chebrough1 and he defined it as "open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology".
Categories:
Open Innovation
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The p53 is a tumor suppressing proteins that activates DNA repair proteins and apoptosis pathways
in response to DNA damages that are not irreparable. Mutations in p53, which affects its activity, are responsible
for developing various cancers; 83% of tumors have alterations or defect in p53 (1). The p53 plays crucial role in
embryonic stem (ES) cells. p53 represses the expression of Nanog, a transcription that is critical for the self-renewal
of ES cells (2). Loss of p53 reduces spontaneous differentiation and apoptosis in human embryonic stem cells (3).
It has been proposed that breast cancer tumors can originate from cancer stem cells or cancer cells become stem cells
due to p53 deficiency, which favors the expansion of cancer stem cells (4). Recent reports (shown below in boxes) have
shown the importance of p53 in various stem cell states. Independent studies from five laboratories have shown that
loss ofp53 is needed for the induction of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from adult cells (see thumbnails).
The role of p53 in cancer stem cells has been shown by a recent study . This study has shown that loss of p53 induces
symmetric cell division in breast cancer stem cells and this favors breast cancer tumor growth (see thumbnails).
Categories:
Stem Cells
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