April 9, 2018 | Posted by Team in Innovation Highlight |
by Gursatya “Guru” Singh, Director of Scientific Content, Science Exchange
Most everyone knows that precision medicine promises to transform the healthcare landscape, delivering powerful and personalized treatments for previously intractable diseases. Even so, biotech innovators still face tremendous hurdles in realizing this promise — chief among them, finding access to sufficient numbers of annotated, characterized and consented patient samples.
Novaseek Research has developed a unique solution to this dilemma: the Clinical Data Network for Research platform — otherwise known as CDNR.
CDNR provides instant access to thousands of ethically-sourced patients’ specimens and associated real-world clinical data in pursuit of advancing the field of personalized medicine. Novaseek obtains biosamples and associated data through its extensive network of physicians, clinical labs, and hospitals. Within this network, Novaseek actively recruits patients to match targeted research needs. Novaseek also maintains a large searchable database of de-identified clinical information representing millions of patients.
Through the Novaseek platform, researchers can easily obtain the data they need throughout the product life cycle. For instance, researchers seeking the statistics necessary for in vitro diagnostics submissions can gain access to sufficient numbers of annotated, characterized and consented patient samples and related data. With CDNR, obtaining clinical data and biospecimens is seamlessly integrated into R&D.
Learn more about Novaseek Research on their Science Exchange storefront.
March 21, 2018 | Posted by Team in Innovation Highlight |
by Gursatya “Guru” Singh, Director of Scientific Content, Science Exchange
Scientific research is advancing without pause; innovations are emerging at a breathtaking rate all over the world through the endeavors of diverse scientific disciplines. The future of scientific research is set on an unpredictable course teeming with both excitement and unease — whether AI-enabled tools will reshape drug discovery or if “patient-on-a-chip” technology will let future scientists create custom therapies for patients on the spot remains to be seen. Amidst the uncertainty, one thing remains clear: Science Exchange will be your fastest path to accessing new and emerging research tools, technologies, and services as the future continues to unfold.
A moment’s time is all you need to learn about the benefits of five promising technologies that may play an integral role in the near future. Sit back and Take 5! If something grabs your interest, click on the provided link to learn more about each service.
NanoMIPS
These novel affinity reagents, sometimes called “plastic antibodies,” have similar specificity to antibodies and can replace antibodies in in vitro applications, including sensing, imaging, purification, analysis, and diagnostics.
NanoMIPs are nanostructured Molecularly Imprinted Polymers, which typically contain a single binding site to a template molecule. NanoMIPs are prepared via a proprietary imprinting process that involves the self-assembly of binding monomers around a target template—these monomers are then polymerized to generate a “synthetic receptor” with high affinity and specificity to the template.
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FANA Antisense Oligonucleotide (FANA – ASO) Technology
This next-generation chemical modification platform provides a superior alternative to CRISPR, siRNA, and shRNA approaches, and can be used to silence or regulate different RNA modalities.
Unlike conventional technologies, FANAs have high fidelity for the RNA target and highly reduced off-target effects (no RISC-associated off-target effects). These attributes represent a more potent, efficient, and cost-effective solution for RNA silencing and regulation.
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I-SCREEN – Intestinal Microbiota Screening Platform
This translational intestinal screening multi-well platform simulates the human colonic microbiota conditions in vitro and helps identify the pharmacological compounds metabolized by intestinal microbiota.
The Netherlands Organization (TNO)’s i-screen service enables rapid identification of drugs that are susceptible to metabolism by intestinal microbiota. Additionally, it can be used to identify unknown metabolites transformed by intestinal microbiota.
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DigiWest™ Multiplex Protein Profiling Services
This service enables comprehensive profiling of up to 800 total and phosphoproteins from cell and tissue samples, using just 20–60 μg of protein.
Unlike other protein-profiling technologies, DigiWest allows in-depth analyses of cell signaling pathways on the level of phosphorylated proteins. As such, DigiWest adds significant value to biomarker identification, precision medicine, compound characterization, and mode-of-action studies.
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3DScreen™ High-Content Assay Development
This unique service is based on a patent-pending biological clearing agent called Visikol™ that penetrates tissue and renders it transparent without causing structural damage.
The assay has applications in the fields of toxicology, preclinical drug development, clinical diagnostics, basic research and plant biology, as tissues can be easily visualized in 3 dimensions.
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Request quotes for these innovative services today!
November 20, 2017 | Posted by Team in News |
PALO ALTO, Calif.–Science Exchange, the world’s leading and most secure enterprise platform and aggregator for outsourced research and development (R&D), today announced a strategic partnership with Alector, a biotech company pioneering the discovery & development of immuno-neurology therapies for neurodegenerative disorders, to provide the company’s scientists access to a private R&D marketplace to accelerate their research.
“The Science Exchange platform solves the challenges of R&D outsourcing: we provide scientists with efficient access to a diverse network of qualified suppliers under a single relationship, and at the same time we provide sourcing departments with more information and control over their outsourcing spend,” said Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Science Exchange. “We are thrilled to be the provider of Alector’s R&D marketplace and help bring potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease to patients more quickly and efficiently. Especially following the exciting news on Alector’s partnership with AbbVie to advance therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, it’s clear that Alector has extremely promising drug targets — we’re honored to help accelerate these important discoveries.”
The Science Exchange-powered R&D marketplace enables scientists to instantly order more than 6,000 unique scientific services from the 2,500 CROs, academic labs, and government facilities that are available under a single Science Exchange contract. The partnership also will provide Alector with a platform to effectively manage the company’s outsourced R&D investments, including the ability to track supplier utilization, trends, and performance, which also supports the need for compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
Alector is the latest R&D company to choose to partner with Science Exchange, and joins more than 30 enterprise organizations, including 10 of the top 20 pharma companies, that use Science Exchange to more efficiently manage outsourced R&D.
“Science Exchange offers a unique platform for connecting with a broad network of qualified scientific service providers,” said Arnon Rosenthal, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Alector. “It is our hope that working with Science Exchange will enable us to more quickly advance discovery and development of novel immuno-neurology therapies.”
Under the agreement, Science Exchange will support company-specific governance, approval workflows, and preferred vendors. To minimize the risk frequently associated with outsourcing to external service providers, the Science Exchange guarantee ensures complete protection of data, assets and performance of agreed-upon services, all backed by a best-in-class, SOC 2-compliant information technology security infrastructure. Science Exchange’s ISO 9001-certified quality assurance system and dedicated regulatory compliance team also support regulated work.
Visit www.scienceexchange.com/enterprise to request a demo of our award-winning private marketplaces for managing outsourced research and development!
October 23, 2017 | Posted by Team in News |
Bay Area Life Science Hub Enables its Startups to Stay Lean with Science Exchange’s R&D Platform
PALO ALTO, CA, October 23, 2017 – Science Exchange, a platform for outsourced research and development (R&D) services, today announced a partnership with QB3, the University of California hub for innovation and entrepreneurship for life sciences.
Through an exclusive Science Exchange-QB3 marketplace, QB3-affiliated companies will now have access to a customized and secure marketplace where they can instantly order R&D services from a network of more than 2,500 qualified scientific service providers. Science Exchange’s scientific concierge staff also will offer support to QB3’s start-up companies in identifying innovative providers and ordering complex R&D services.
“Science Exchange will help accelerate our companies by giving them access to providers that are experienced with entrepreneurial research and that have already been reviewed and qualified,” said Ioana Aanei, Ph.D., Entrepreneurship Program Manager at QB3. “Many of our startups don’t have the resources to purchase their own capital equipment or do the necessary specialized scientific research in-house.”
“Science Exchange is committed to helping life science companies bring innovative, potentially life-saving products to market,” said Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., Founder & CEO of Science Exchange. “While QB3’s companies focus on discovery, we can help eliminate the barriers, including the time and expertise needed to research and qualify contract research organizations (CROs) and scientific service providers. We also help save time and money in contract negotiation, all while ensuring the protection of intellectual property.”
QB3 joins more than 30 enterprise clients and entrepreneurial incubators that are efficiently managing their outsourced R&D with Science Exchange-powered marketplaces.
About QB3
QB3 is the University of California’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship in the life sciences. The institute supports UC researchers and empowers Bay Area entrepreneurs to launch startup companies and partner with industry. QB3 helps bio-entrepreneurs create hundreds of high-value jobs and bring more than $750 million into the Bay Area each year. With campus divisions at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, QB3 is also affiliated with the San Francisco incubator [email protected] — home to more than 45 companies — and the seed-stage venture capital firm Mission Bay Capital. Visit us at http://qb3.org/.
September 20, 2017 | Posted by Team in Provider Spotlight |
By Natalie Foote, Director of Service Provider Operations, Science Exchange | www.scienceexchange.com
In this Provider Innovation Profile, we’re proud to feature Transcriptic, whose automated cellular and molecular biology platform enables scalable life science research with flexibility and precision.
Automation is a rapidly advancing area of biotechnology, and Science Exchange hopes to give our researchers access to unique robotics platforms while helping them save on equipment costs and manage laboratory space limitations.
Transcriptic’s robotic cloud lab paradigm means biologists can be running experiments on the other side of the planet from their lab, leveraging a bank of robotic workcells for massive experimentation.
Transcriptic frees researchers to focus on the creative aspects of their science by providing faster, more reliable and repeatable processes with vastly lower capital costs than previously possible.
Differentiators: Transparency, flexibility, multiplex-ity
Multiple integrated automated devices per workcell
- Transparency: No other service provider on the planet can tell you exactly how they run an experiment on the user’s behalf. Transcriptic provides deep transparency into how users’ experiments were run by executing experiments exactly as specified and also providing retrospective diagnostic data on individual instrument performance during the experiment.
- Flexible robotics: Being a robotic cloud lab, the Transcriptic system can dynamically provision robotic resources to process samples for users. For example, the system might start the week at a scale of one plate and end the week on hundreds of plates. Users only pay for the resources they use, reaping the reproducibility and throughput benefits of robotics without any of the overhead.
- Easy multiplexing: The Transcriptic web application makes it easy as checking a box to detect an additional analyte in your sample. When it’s that easy, you can perform multiplexed quantiation of more analytes, starting to generate a more accurate picture of the phenotypic state of your sample.
Featured Service: Mesocale Discovery (MSD) Assay
The MSD assay, validated in many bioanalytical methods per U.S. FDA and EMA guidances, is offered as a service by Transcriptic. The Mesoscale Discovery Sector S 600 instrument is fully integrated with the Transcriptic robotic cloud lab.
The MSD S 600 instrument performs multiplexed detection of up to 10 analytes per well, ensuring the highest data-to-sample quantity efficiency, in immunoassays. Multiple assay panels are available from the V-Plex line, all conducted with complete automated precision by robots in the cloud. Custom panel assays are also available through the MSD U-Plex system.
Why requesters choose Transcriptic
Transcriptic, in collaboration with multiple biopharma companies and non-academic laboratories, has delivered many peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.
Transcriptic presented one interesting study at SynBioBeta 2016. In collaboration with EpiBiome, Transcriptic’s automated platform provided a robust, reproducible and high-throughput method for on-demand microbiome characterization. This workflow captured sample prep through NGS and sequencing analysis in 7-10 days, allowing for fast, iterative cycles of microbiome screening.
Visit the Transcriptic storefront today to request some quotes!
August 2, 2017 | Posted by Team in Innovation Highlight, New Innovations |
Image of Colon Tumor Stem Cells courtesy of OcellO
If you aren’t exploring the latest cell culture models of human tissue for nonclinical and preclinical testing, you should be.
That’s the bottom line of today’s Science Exchange service provider roundup — three of the five newest service providers on our platform are experts in developing predictive models.
Advances in predictive model systems
Axiogenesis, based in Germany, develops iPSC-derived models of cardiac tissue, neurons, and other cell types. In late 2016, the company made the news when researchers at the United States FDA published a peer-reviewed study showing that Axiogenesis’s Cor.4U cardiomyocyte model was the most predictive model in cardiac safety tests. Last month, researchers at Wake Forest University used the Cor.4U model to develop a digitally trackable beating-heart biosensor. The future of cardiac safety clearly lies beyond hERG channel electrophysiology!
Generating tissue models with precise spatial resolution is possible using 3D bioprinting, in which Cypre Biotech is an expert. Based in San Francisco, USA, the company focuses on customizing the extracellular matrix of tumor microenvironment models to match certain cancer subtypes. Given the impact of new cancer drugs, including certain immunotherapies, on the tumor microenvironment, technologies such as that developed by Cypre are going to be needed for testing safety and efficacy.
The third service provider in this roundup excelling in the development of clinically relevant microtissue models is OcellO, headquartered in the Netherlands. Researchers at OcellO have published numerous peer-reviewed studies showing how combining three-dimensional tissue culture with high-throughput imaging can enable efficient, automated screening and phenotypic profiling. Their most recent publication showed that phenotypic screening of kinase inhibitors could reveal potential new targets for polycystic kidney disease (view abstract in the Resources section of the OcellO storefront).
Analytical methods for translational research
As model systems advance in complexity and throughput, analytical methods must keep pace. Two service providers new on Science Exchange are known for their expertise in developing reliable analytical methods.
Pangaea Oncology is one of the most prestigious laboratories in the world in the fields of molecular diagnostics, pathology, and related analysis services for translational research. We are thrilled to have the Pangaea team, led by expert Dr. Rafael Rosell and Nobel laureate Dr. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, join the Science Exchange platform! Pangaea Oncology was the first laboratory in Spain to be accredited to perform certain genetic tests for cancer in serum/plasma samples, advancing precision medicine.
We also bring you Metis Laboratories, whose analytical expertise centers on radiotracer-based assays. These assays remain one of the most sensitive and specific platforms for assessing ligand binding and compound distribution; however, complex handling requirements mean that outsourcing these studies is far more practical than developing radiotracer assays in house.
Connect with a new provider today!
Are you new to Science Exchange? See how it works.
June 9, 2017 | Posted by Team in News |
New “CRO Finder” Connects Scientists with Specialized Resources
by Cliff Culver, VP Strategy and GM, Science Exchange | www.scienceexchange.com
NEW YORK, June 7, 2017 — The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), the only public charity solely focused on funding the development of drugs for Alzheimer’s, and Science Exchange today announced the launch of ADDF ACCESS, a first-of-its-kind online platform designed to match scientists working on central nervous system (CNS) diseases with a vetted network of contract research organizations (CROs).
ADDF ACCESS meets the unique needs of scientists in both academia and small biotech companies by combining the resources of Science Exchange, the world’s leading marketplace for outsourced research and development, with the Alzheimer’s drug discovery knowledge of the ADDF.
“Drug discovery requires a wide range of expertise, from medicinal chemistry and pharmacology to project management and regulatory affairs,” said Lauren Friedman, Ph.D., ADDF ACCESS program director. “Researchers don’t always have the interdisciplinary teams needed to develop a drug. We created the new ACCESS website with Science Exchange to connect researchers with high-quality CROs and provide guidance and resources to help successfully advance their drug programs.”
On ADDF ACCESS, scientists will find:
- A network of CROs and consultants with CNS drug discovery expertise, vetted by the ADDF and Science Exchange
- An expert concierge service to match scientists with the right CROs, solicit multiple competitive quotes, and manage projects
- A library of educational resources, including a guide to CNS drug discovery and development
“Early-stage drug research is the engine that drives progress in treating Alzheimer’s and CNS diseases,” said Dr. Howard Fillit, M.D., executive director and chief science officer of the ADDF. “We are excited to provide a resource specifically designed to facilitate connections that fuel this engine. Every scientific discovery gets us closer to finding a treatment.”
“Eliminating the laborious, resource-intensive process of finding and negotiating with CROs and other service providers helps researchers focus on their important work, and that’s what Science Exchange is all about,” said Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Science Exchange. “We are thrilled to partner with the ADDF on this new ACCESS website that will give scientists specializing in CNS diseases the tools and services they need to bring important, potentially life-saving drugs to market faster.”
To learn more, visit https://www.alzdiscovery.org/addf-access
About the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF)
Founded in 1998 by Leonard A. and Ronald S. Lauder, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) is dedicated to rapidly accelerating the discovery of drugs to prevent, treat and cure Alzheimer’s disease. The ADDF is the only public charity solely focused on funding the development of drugs for Alzheimer’s, employing a venture philanthropy model to support research in academia and the biotech industry. Through the generosity of its donors, the ADDF has awarded over $100 million to fund more than 500 Alzheimer’s drug discovery programs and clinical trials in 18 countries. To learn more, please visit: http://www.alzdiscovery.org/.
About Science Exchange
Science Exchange is the world’s leading marketplace for outsourced research. Science Exchange provides an efficient procure-to-pay platform for ordering services from the world’s largest network of scientific service providers. Through Science Exchange, clients gain access to over 2,400 qualified service providers, all with pre-established contracts in place that protect client intellectual property and confidentiality. This increases scientists access to innovation and significantly improves their productivity because they are freed up from the administrative tasks and delays associated with sourcing, establishing and managing service provider contracts. At an organizational level, the Science Exchange enterprise program enables organizations to consolidate the long tail of research outsourcing spend into a single strategic relationship driving significant efficiency and cost savings. To date, Science Exchange has raised over $30 million from Maverick Capital Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, OATV, the YC Continuity Fund, and others. For more information, visit www.scienceexchange.com.
SOURCE Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation
Related Links
http://www.alzdiscovery.org
March 31, 2014 | Posted by Tess Mayall in Provider Spotlight |
Recently I spoke with Dr. Aman and Todd Pelham at IBT Bioservices, I was blown away by the care and consideration they put into their work.
IBT Bioservices is an early stage drug discovery company that knows the research process doesn’t always go as expected. The lab work isn’t simple; it’s filled twists and turns along the way. As a result, IBT Bioservices is a new version of CRO that has increased expertise and communication to navigate all the bumps in the road.
IBT Bioservices is dedicated to infectious disease research. With expertise in immunology, virology, bacteriology, and animal model development, they’ve established a core of services focused on adding value to early R&D programs. Read the rest of this entry »
August 1, 2012 | Posted by Team in Innovation Highlight |
The following is an interview conducted by Science Exchange with Barry Bunin, CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). You can find more info on CDD at: https://www.collaborativedrug.com/
Q: What prompted you to create CDD?
A: First we saw a need to broadly empower scientists with self-explanatory technologies for scientific data and decision management. I especially noticed in academia there were brilliant scientists lacking the infrastructure and software tools that industry has to accelerate research and development.
Read the rest of this entry »
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