Molecular Diagnostics Asia

CRB exhibited for the first time at this meeting hosted by SelectBiosciences. This was a typical SelectBiosciences meeting with 3 threads running concurrently similar to the meeting we attended in South San Francisco in September, the threads were:

• Molecular Diagnostics
• RNAi
• Screening

The event was hosted by the Genome Institute of Singapore located in the rather lovely environment of the Biopolis site at the One-North site in Singapore. One-North is a research district set up by the Singapore government and this site is dedicated to biomedical research. It consists of several dedicated buildings all linked by sky bridges to symbolise the networking between research areas. Institutes based here are overseen by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and pharma companies such as the  Novartis Institute of Tropical Disease is also located on the site. The site is internationally renowned and has scientists from all over the world (over 2500 scientists at present). Whilst here we had the chance to meet up with an old friend at the Experimental Therapeutics Centre. The ETC was set up in 2007 to advance and develop drug discovery in Singapore specifically to take forward promising research from academia into proof of concept and first in human trials. It has an interesting remit and looks at peptidomimetics and new antibody technologies so is at the forefront of our field.

The meeting itself was disappointingly quiet despite the great location; considerably quieter than the previous SelectBioscience molecular diagnostics meeting in San Francisco. The focus was very much on RNAi and diagnostics did not feature heavily in the content; there were only 3 diagnostics posters presented at the conference! As a result our custom peptide synthesis and custom antibody services were not in great demand. More interest was expressed in Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNA) which we distribute for Panagene, but unfortunately not in this area of the world.

This meeting did present a good opportunity to finally visit Singapore and continue CRB’s expansion into Asia but we would be unlikely to attend this one again. The research community in Singapore seems to be vibrant despite this and we hope to be working with more of you soon. Having supplied customers in the area for many years we know it is very easy to ship our custom materials here and as Singapore itself speaks English this plays to our strengths in custom reagent generation. The key to great reagents is in understanding the customer end requirements and this is something we strive to achieve in every case; a common language certainly helps with this! As the UK and Singapore have such a shared history we would like to build upon this by collaborating with researchers here. If you are a Researcher in Singapore please do get in touch to see how we can help.

Molecular Diagnostics World Congress – San Francisco

The Molecular Diagnostics World Congress was one thread of a 4 thread conference run by SelectBiosciences  the other strands were the Microarray World Congress, Lab-on-a chip World Congress & the Single Cell Analysis Summit.

The location of the meeting was the South San Francisco Conference Centre and the venue provided to be very good with excellent coffee and meals provided during those vital breaks where all the real thinking and science gets done. The layout was very good and the conference organisers had done a good job of integrating exhibitors with delegates whilst managing to accomodate a large number of poster boards presenting some interesting science.

We met a variety of people from all scientific fields as the attendees from all the threads met and mingled in the exhibition hall. Scientists had come from all over the world for this meeting and we had the opportunity to discuss the Rugby World Cup (and a bit of peptide chemistry!) with scientists from Australia and New Zealand. Scientists were present from all areas of the scientific community; academia, traditional big pharma, biotech and diagnostics companies were all represented and this mix made for some varied and interesting presentations and discussions.

The big area of discussion for us seemed to be the use of polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies within flow diagnostics and lab-on-a-chip applications i.e. capture antibodies within chip based screening or cell sorting type devices. This is an interesting and constantly developing area and it seems that as with all areas in science the interface between Physics and Biology is producing some good collaborations, research and products. This is of course,  very tied into the field of personalised medicine, which is a current buzzword and area of great interest for the healthcare community.

From our perspective this was a very valuable meeting and we had interest in custom peptides, custom antibodies, fluorescent labelling and PNA (Peptide Nucleic Acids) so we were kept busy answering questions; some easy and some a little more challenging which is appreciated as for those of us who left the lab some time ago it is nice to get into some real science.

It would be nice to attend this meeting next year, we will certainly be considering it and we look forward to meeting many more of you at future meetings.

The American Peptide Symposium 2011

This year the 22^nd edition of the very popular APS annual symposium took place from the 24th-30th June in sunny San Diego at the Sheraton Hotel and Marina on Harbor Island. San Diego definitely deserves its title of America’s Finest City: There is a lot to see and do, from Sea World to the beautiful Balboa Park and the zoo, Old Town and Little Italy, downtown to the Gaslamp and finally the Seaport and Coronado Island… Back to the peptide world, the theme of the symposium was “Building Bridges” (not disulphides, bridges between disciplines) to symbolize the role of peptide science in an increasing number of disciplines. Now the figures, 73 lectures to find out about the latest applications of peptides in material science, bioconjugation, therapeutics, cancer… 62 exhibitors split between the Pavilion and the Nautilus where the posters (430 According to the programme!) were also displayed.

What we liked:

• The friendly atmosphere: the peptide world is a small world and the APS meeting is a fantastic opportunity to network and catch up with friends
• The quality of the speakers (some very distinguished)
•  Jennifer Ottesen’s² synthesis of acetylated Histone H3 using a Dawson Dbz resin with alloc protecting groups (to avoid the nasty peptide branching)
•  A lot of Click chemistry
•  Jean Chmielewski’s³ functionalised collagen to produce spheres, discs or fibers
•  Christian Becker’s⁴ optimised synthesis of a protein with 3 transmembrane domains.
•  San Diego

What we didn’t like:

•  The packed lunches! Nothing memorable…
•   The tent, so far from the lecture hall.

Useful links:

¹ Ashaf Brik’s lab at Ben Gurion University
² Jennifer Ottesen’s lab at Ohio State University
³ Jean Chmielewski’s lab at Purdue University
⁴ Christian Becker – Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich 

American Diabetes Association 71st Scientific Sessions

After many suggestions from our clients that we should attend; CRB finally exhibited at the American Diabetes Association annual meeting for the first time from June 24^th to the 28^th in the beautiful city of San Diego.

This meeting brought together over 17,500 people from all walks of life with an interest in Diabetes from research through diagnostics and medical to patients so there was an interesting mix of people browsing the exhibition and some interesting sights to see. All of us at CRB joined in the fray and took advantage of the free haemoglobin A1C tests being provided by suppliers such as Biorad and Novo Nordisk. A1C is a biomarker of interest in determining if a person is pre-diabetic or diabetic. I am pleased to say that none of us were surprised with a positive for diabetes result but it did illustrate the growing importance of biomarkers and personalised medicine. Increasingly we find that our custom antibody customers are working within the field of  biomarker discovery and within the diagnostics field so it was a good venue for us to see what this all leads to in the “real” world. Traditionally our customers have been focussing on using our peptides and antibodies for investigating biological systems to identify lead targets for drug discovery but now they also are interested in  monitoring biomarkers so that the developed treatments can be used on the appropriate patients. It is a fascinating area and seems to bring the researchers closer to the patient.

The meeting was held in the the San Diego Convention Center, this center is huge and the exhibition was well run as they specialise in big meetings such as this. The center is right next to downtown San Diego which was very convenient for conference attendees. The city itself is very pleasant and judging by the amount of people around the city with conference badges everyone was enjoying their visit both to the conference and also to the city.

We did suffer from the “June Gloom” which is a coastal fog which blocks the sun in San Diego at this time of year but when the Sun did break through it was very pleasant. Apparently June is renowned as the month of the year not to visit San Diego but we were there for the science and not the sun. Our head chemist Dr Laurent Caron was also in the city at the same time attending the American Peptide Society annual meeting and stayed on for a few days after the conference and apparently it cleared up and was beautifully sunny as soon as the sales team left!

We had interest in custom peptides and antibodies at this meeting so it seems that our services are required within this area of the research world so thanks to those people who suggested we attend.

The meeting next year will be held in Philadelphia from June 8th-12^th.

The Peptide Conference 2011

This year, the Peptide Conference 2011 organised by Avakado media was taking place at Chilford Hall Vineyard and Conference Centre in Linton, Cambridge (UK). The event attracted a lot of sponsors but delegates still had to pay a steep 895 Euros to have the privilege to attend. As expected, the attendance was on the low side. After picking up a hire car at Cambridge Station, I drove to Linton which was fairly easy to locate but could not find the Vineyard (my satnav was suggesting strange things and I ignored it!). After enjoying the countryside for some time, I decided to ask a local and finally arrived at the venue. The conference was taking place in a barn, which was slightly strange but a pleasant change.

The first session entitled Peptide Structure and Drug Discovery was a succession of talks from various peptide companies. Sadly, the attention was not always in the detail and some presentations lacked depth. Thankfully, Don Wellings saved the day with some interesting ideas.

Don is a regular speaker at peptide meetings. He is interested in developing cheap technologies for peptide synthesis and is trying to raise interest in his glass beads technology. The idea is to use cheap jewellery beads made on ton scale and coat them with a resin for peptide synthesis.  Another idea is to polymerise oligolysines (made by bacterial fermentation for use as food preservatives) using various cross-linkers.

The second session (Peptide Therapeutics) mainly involved institutional and academic speakers. Mike Gait (Medical Research Council), a world expert in the synthesis of analogues of DNA/RNA such as Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNAs) and Peptide Morpholinos (PMOs) presented some work on the conjugation of analogues to Cell Penetrating Peptides (CPPs). Mike is a very engaging speaker and his presentations are always full of good content. Later, Prof. Rob Lizkamp (Utrecht University) described some dendrimer constructs and some discontinuous epitopes mimicry using his scaffolds. The paper is available online (free of charge!) if you are interested in the triazacyclophane (TAC) scaffold.

Mixed feelings at the end of conference, some good and some bad…