Features

When is a health treatment really new? When is a medical treatment really an invention? Patent attorney Isobel Finnie explores how diagnostic definitions vary between the European and American jurisdictions...

Biological Sciences, Biology, Biotech, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, In Depth, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacology

Opening up drug discovery

September 12, 2016

Collaboration is vital in modern drug discovery – but how to be transparent yet retain competitiveness? And more importantly, how can the academic-industrial relationship be maintained with integrity? Professor Jackie...

Catch them if you can

September 12, 2016

When it comes to the performance of your fluorescence microscopy system, every photon is sacred – but how to catch as many as you can? Dr Martin Thomas has some...

Biological Sciences, Biology, Biotech, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, In Depth, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacology

Ethics of genetics: More than just designer babies

September 6, 2016

Work around the human genome and advances in the accessibility and analysis of data, creates huge opportunities for early healthcare interventions. But the advent of genomic information and evolving technology...

Biological Sciences, Biology, Biotech, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, In Depth, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacology

Keeping research pure

August 31, 2016

The antibody market is a huge worldwide industry, but how do scientists know that what they are ordering is of the best possible quality? Dr Giancarlo Barone explains the current...

Are biosimilars coming of age?

August 25, 2016

Monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies have become a mainstay of modern medicine, but are unaffordable for patients in many parts of the world. Biosimilars expert Dr Brian Wendelburg discusses how successful...

Fantastic ceramic

August 23, 2016

From joint replacements to microfluidics – additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, promises so much for the biomedical industry.

Materials

In Depth, Materials, Materials Science

The super-organism behind Nature’s skyscraper

August 11, 2016

Notions of the ‘super-organism’ need to be invoked to truly understand the intelligence behind Nature’s skyscraper – the termite mound. Hunter King discusses the hive-mind behind these incredible structures and...

Biological Sciences, Biology, Biotech, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, In Depth, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacology

X-ray vision

August 9, 2016

Bees navigate by sensing the polarisation of light. We now know that some rainforest-dwelling bees can measure polarisation much more accurately than previously assumed. Dr Andrew Bodey tells us how...

Biological Sciences, Biology, Biotech, Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, In Depth, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacology

Too old and too big: The dark enigma of supermassive black holes

August 4, 2016

A research team from Italy is taking on one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology – supermassive black holes. How could it be that they existed so soon after the...

Raising the bar?

July 26, 2016

The role of science in sport is becoming ever more important, and with the Olympic Games upon us we turn our attention to slippery swimmers, windy runners and biomechanics to...

Pulling ourselves together

July 21, 2016

As laboratory equipment becomes more interconnected, can the Internet of Things help tackle the ‘reproducibility crisis’? Possibly – but, say Nicolas Paris and Klemen Zupancic, all vendors and scientists need...