The potential of engineered human liver co-cultures in phenotypic drug discovery for liver diseases

As the body’s circulating army of first responders, antibodies recognize and destroy foreign and potentially disease-causing pathogens. The engineering of synthetic antibody forms and conjugates has produced a whole new arsenal of tools for applications in research, diagnostics, and therapeutics. Forward-engineering approaches create new recognition sites and molecular functions for antibody products to accurately and efficiently detect previously undetectable molecular targets with an increased response lifetime. For a closer look at the fastest growing class of synthetic therapeutics, The Scientist is bringing together a panel of experts to share their research, discuss the current design and optimization approaches, and to offer insight on the future outlook of antibody engineering. Join us as these experts share best practices and tips for optimally engineered antibodies.

Food fraud is estimated to cost the world economy more than $49 billion per year. The 2013 horse meat scandal alone was reported to cost the UK economy more than £1 billion. The effects of food adulteration reach much further than just these serious economic consequences. The Chinese infant formula scandal, which led to multiple mortalities and hundreds of thousands of babies hospitalized, brought into focus the health implications of economically motivated adulteration. Therefore, stakeholders in the food industry should be stepping up to help eliminate this global problem, not only to protect company brand identity but also to safeguard the well-being of consumers. A key aim of the scientific community should be to arm these stakeholders with the appropriate tools to make economically motivated food adulteration a thing of the past. New approaches are needed to help tackle food adulteration. Traditional targeted methods are failing to keep up with the actions of fraudsters, who are numerous and are active at multiple points throughout the globalized supply chain. There is now a general movement toward non-targeted methodologies to detect food adulteration. Instead of looking for individual components or analytes, non-targeted methods work by taking a much more holistic approach. In many ways the aim is to model normality for a commodity, then look for differences present in a suspect sample that is outside of this normal. In this way, if a fraudster changes what they are using to adulterate with, the analyst will still be able to detect an anomaly.

Learn new methods to optimize the process between anaerobic digestion and the combined heat and power engine. Vaisala’s Product Manager Antti Heikkilä explains in detail the crucial measurement points related to humidity, methane, and carbon dioxide, and demonstrates how biogas production can be more profitable while keeping operating expenses to a minimum.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought virology to the forefront of many research programs. But how do we get ahead of the next viral threat? Limited commercial labs are licensed to conduct research using BSL-3 or BSL-4 pathogens.