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An artist's impression of targeted delivery of cytotoxic drugs to a cancer cell by internalization of the complex formed between antibody-drug conjugate (AD C) and its antigen. Junutula et al. produce near-homogenous AD Cs that are better tolerated than conventional AD Cs without any loss of anti-tumor activity (p 925). Credit: Allison Bruce, Genentech, Inc.
With Beijing 2008 in full swing, the World Anti-Doping Agency's Olivier Rabin is looking for help from the biotech and pharma industry in the battle against cheaters.
Receiving only a fraction of the investment set aside for biofuels, biomaterials will likely have to piggyback on technological advances in energy production to compete with petroleum-based products in the marketplace. Emily Waltz reports.
Off-label prescribing is a fundamental fact of life of healthcare systems, but the promotion of off-label uses by drug sponsors is a fundamental sin. Regulators, legislators and drug makers are wrestling to find the right balance.
The Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) project aims to foster the coordinated development of minimum-information checklists and provide a resource for those exploring the range of extant checklists.
The expectation maximization algorithm arises in many computational biology applications that involve probabilistic models. What is it good for, and how does it work?
Biological control of the root-knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita, one of the world's most destructive crop pathogens, presents a major opportunity for safely improving global agricultural yields. Its 86-Mb genome—the first to be sequenced for a strictly parthenogenetic species—provides a blueprint to design new strategies for plant protection.
Generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells is still an inefficient process, in part because the delivery of reprogramming factors by retroviral vectors yields cell populations that are genetically heterogeneous. Wernig et al. increase efficiency by producing iPS-cell chimeric mice from which they isolate cells bearing identical proviral insertions that support drug-inducible reprogramming.
Systemic toxicity associated with heterogeneity in the stoichiometries and sites of drug attachment is a major hurdle to developing antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for cancer therapy. Junutula et al. engineer cysteine residues in constant domains to produce near-homogenous ADCs that are better tolerated than conventional ADCs, without any loss of antitumor activity.
Little is known about the regulation of RNA interference (RNAi). Shan et al. constructed a reporter system to monitor RNAi activity and identified a small molecule that increases RNAi by facilitating the interaction between small RNAs and a protein involved in small RNA loading and processing.
The targets of a microRNA (miRNA) are usually identified by computational analysis of sequences complementary to the miRNA. Working with inflorescence tissue of Arabidopsis, German et al. devise an experimental approach in which the products of miRNA-mediated cleavage are sequenced and used to identify miRNA–target RNA pairs.