May 2016 Issue of The Medicine Maker

VR is creating a buzz, but is it a game changer or gimmick?

Scientists use hydrophobic plasma and AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ to coat porous silicon microparticles for drug delivery

Are you a budding biotech or pharma startup? “The Hive” could be your chance to showcase your work

What’s the best way to present a health resource? Apparently, ease of use trumps all other factors

Abbott, Abbvie and Sanofi all make separate merger announcements – on the same day

A US coalition seeks lower prices for US prescription drugs, but could their proposals undermine the competitive market?

Can the stress of space force fungi to produce novel therapeutics?

Are the metrics used to measure cancer drug efficacy inherently flawed?

Antibody drug conjugates offer a great deal of potential for drug targeting, but what’s the best way of linking drugs and antibodies?

Our experience with implementing serialization, has shown us that anti-counterfeiting is just one of its potential uses.

Intellectual property issues have suffocated many industry collaborations. And though IP is clearly valuable to pharma companies, there is also value in learning to let go.

As politicians and the public argue over the minor point of the UK leaving Europe, we ask a more important question: what will a “Brexit” mean for the global pharmaceutical industry?

Angus Dalgleish tells us about his experience with EU regulation – and why he thinks Britain should leave the EU.

Steve Bates, CEO of the British BioIndustry Association (BIA) explains why he thinks the UK bioindustry is stronger inside the European Union.

Astronomers Chris Leigh and Mike Merrifield debate how a potential Brexit might impact UK science

Where did Quality by Design come from? Where will it lead to in pharma? And is there a day when the concept will no longer exist?

The term ‘packaging’ may not immediately evoke excitement – but without innovation in the field, some therapies wouldn’t even reach market. In other words, don’t judge a box by its cover because there’s more to packaging than meets the eye… and even more lies on the horizon.

Andrew Lees lightheartedly states that he has built his career on two tenets: multivalency and being lazy. And it’s worked out well; while moonlighting as a magician, he has developed the conjugation chemistry behind some of the world's most-used vaccines. Here, he explains how he learned to combine science and magic.

... or sonicate until the cockroaches disappear. When writing is central to the job of assuring health, safety, and quality, can you afford to be loose with language prone to misunderstanding? Why take a chance? Here are a few strategies to edit your written work for quality control.

Sitting Down With... Ann Hayes, Owner, The Ann Hayes Consultancy, Stevenage, UK.

Traditional pharma manufacturers are already dipping their toes in the waters of continuous processing, but what about when it comes to biopharmaceuticals?

This application note explores the use of the Morphologi G3-ID for Morphologically-Directed Raman spectroscopy (MDRS) to identify and analyze contaminants including protein aggregates present in a stressed sample of lysozyme, and to compare particles held in suspension within a thin path wet cell with those collected on a filter membrane.

This application note provides an example of how Archimedes can be used to detect and quantify the formation of protein sub-visible particles and the introduction of silicone oil droplets, in response to shear stress.

The ability to compare concentration data across users, instruments and sites is a key requirement for many applications. Concentration repeatability and reproducibility are greatly improved with the application of the NTA concentration measurement upgrade, which has also been shown to reduce the influence of user selected capture and analysis settings on measurements. This application note describes the improvement in accuracy and precision of concentration measurements over a wide range of sample sizes, concentrations and materials.

Viscosizer TD provides automated relative viscosity measurements with high reproducibility at low viscosity, to help identify molecules with abnormally high viscosity-concentration profiles at low sample concentrations as early as possible in the development pipeline