Microcarrier-based biomanufacturing has become well established and now represents a large market across all scales of production. Bioreactors on offer which can use microcarriers range from lab sized, with a few liters of capacity, to factory sized, at hundreds or thousands of liters.
A new wave of innovation is leading to the development of a 2nd generation of ever-more complex organoids, known as assembloids, that will enable more powerful studies to be conducted within the confines of a culture dish allowing greater insights and reducing our reliance on animal models.
Cochlear implants can help restore hearing, but without functional sensory ganglion neurons to integrate the implant with the brain, their performance is limited. At present, there are no approved medications specifically targeting sensory recovery.
It is accepted wisdom that the visual sense is the dominant of the five senses for us humans. A notion that also has translated into sensory research. Or as the author of a paper in 2019 asked “Why Is There So Much More Research on Vision Than on Any Other Sensory Modality?†in which he observed that more textbook and journal article inches are spent on vision than on any other sensory modality across multiple disciplines ranging from biomedical sciences to perception and cognitive psychology.
Exosomes are proving highly versatile. Researchers are aiming to exploit their considerable talents for therapeutic cargo delivery to create a new class of drugs. Perhaps most exciting is their potential to enable an emerging spectrum of RNA-based therapies.
Chemotherapy, using chemicals that are particularly toxic to rapidly dividing cancer cells, is the most commonly used cancer treatment, often in combination with surgery and/or radiotherapy. However, the side effects of chemotherapy are severe. Exosomes may offer a way of better targeting chemotherapy to cancer cells.
Biological discovery and crisis can both give rise to entirely new fields of study. In this article, we assess the impact of Covid on research output in 2020 and the rise of technologies such as CRISPR and cell reprogramming that have shaped the last 20 years.
Many cancers have developed an efficient way of blocking the body’s natural immune response by overexpressing a protein called programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1). Antibodies that neutralize PD-L1 are highly effective in some patients. Exosome-based diagnostics can predict responders.
Times of crisis can precipitate rapid technological development and the Covid-19 crisis is presenting an opportunity for new therapeutic modalities. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s Covid vaccines which both rely on RNA have been ground-breaking. Could Covid-19 also clear the path for the first exosome therapeutics?
Despite iPSCs having potential in many biomedical applications, there are currently major challenges that need to be addressed to unleash the full potential of iPSCs for disease modelling, both in clinical settings and their use for safety pharmacology to provide more effective and safer regenerative therapy.
