Concepts
Introduction and Table of Contents
This page contains helpful information and links to understand concepts and terminology in both the biosciences and technology aspects of this project. This page can be seen as a quick way to grasp and reference many of terms, ideas, and concepts that are spoken about in the weekly meetings.
Bioscience Concepts
Biological Pathways
Organisms such as the human body carry out biological functions. These biological functions can scale from simply moving something from inside to outside of a cell, to much larger synchronized movements. To carry out such a task, the organism makes a series of steps that change molecules from one thing to another thing known as pathways. The tasks that need to be done through biological pathways can include; making new proteins, making changes to cell structure, or making/taking nutrients for metabolism. Most pathways for our purposes begins with a surface receptor and ends with a product that typically gets sent to another cell afterwards.
For our project, we mainly need to worry pathways that affect individual cells rather than whole systems.
Drug Development Pipeline
In order to get a medication to the point where you can find it on the shelf of your grocery store or behind the counter of your pharmacy, it had to go through the drug development pipeline. The Pipeline is a standardized model for recognizing, experimenting, testing, confirming, and approving a chemical compound for human use.
There are a few common steps in the pipeline:
Basic Research
This is to find new chemical or biological compounds. Testing is normally done on cells or individual proteins to confirm whether they have effects or not.
Pre-clinical studies
This done on human cell lines that are close what diseases they are supposed to work on, or they are done on animals that have traits that are similar to the disease we are looking to treat.
Clinical Trials/Studies
This is testing done on humans and there are substeps of this process according to how many people are enrolled in the study. These are phase I, phase II, and phase III studies, respectively.
Drug approval
This is about whether or not a compound that has completed all the steps positively to this point is approved by it's appropriate regulatory agency.
Post-Marketing and Monitoring
Companies will often continue to conduct studies post approval to mointor for unforeseen side effects, test different dosing schedules, and gather data on different co-morbidties.
Our research group is located on Steps 1/2 of the development pipeline.
High Throughput Drug Screening
HIgh throughput drug screening is a technique that aims to increase the speed and decrease the cost of drug development. This is achieved through the implementation of new technology such as robotics, and automated software and processes. This allows a research group to conduct a large number of individual experiments in a shorter amount of time compared to conducting the same amount of experiment manually.
