LMB In The News

“G-protein-coupled receptors are hot drug targets, and plenty of companies want to know what they look like to get an edge on making new drugs. Despite recent advances, getting X-ray crystal structures for GPCRs is still far from easy. Heptares Therapeutics, joins a trio of firms in licensing their structure-determining technology and partnering with large drugmakers to help push GPCR drug discovery forward. Heptares Therapeutics obtains GPCR X-ray structures with help from thermal stabilization – a targeted mutation technique developed by Chris Tate and Richard Henderson at LMB.” More…

“LMB scientists take part in a round-table discussion about Max Perutz.” More…

“A number of signalling pathways discovered in Drosophila flies and other model organisms have subsequently turned out to be important in cancer and specifically in cancer stem cell function. Mariann Bienz talks about the role of the Wnt signalling pathway in cancer growth and cancer metastases but warns of difficulties developing therapies to target this pathway. Prof Bienz explains what progress has been made by academic labs working to develop therapies to target signalling pathways and explains the mechanisms through which the pathways can be affected.” More…

“An unnatural amino acid has given researchers a switch to turn on a specific enzyme with light. This tool will allow scientists to determine the timing of cellular signaling and identify which parts of a signaling network might be good drug targets. When organisms or cells receive signals from their surroundings, a cascade of enzymes known as kinases pass those signals along. These signaling cascades are complicated networks that can be hard to interpret in real time. Jason Chin and Arnaud Gautier from LMB, along with Alexander Deiters of North Carolina State University, may have found a way to make such interpretation easier.” More…

“The Distinguished Technopreneur Speaker (DTS) Forum, organised by Exploit Technologies, serves as a relevant platform for entrepreneurs, industry leaders, researchers, scholars and students to converge, share ideas and network with various industry players to seed the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship amongst the local scientific community. This year’s Distinguished Technopreneur Speaker Award recipient is serial inventor and entrepreneur, Sir Gregory Winter.” This article is no longer available from the source website: A*Star 19 January 2011

“With world-class facilities and a vibrant research community, the Babraham Research Campus has recently attracted some of the most exciting new generation antibody companies in Europe…In the 1980s, Jonathan Howard and Geoff Butcher from the Babraham Institute collaborated closely with Nobel Prize winner César Milstein and colleagues at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) to produce, what were described as, ‘the first useful monoclonal antibodies’.” This article is no longer available from the source website: BBSRC 14 January 2011