Top Life Sciences Videos of 2014

1. Brand New Technology Aids Personalized Medicine Epigenetics
In this video, Professor Steve Conlan from Swansea University, UK, describes the development of a new technology for high-throughput epigenetics, enabling fast and accurate results. Personalized medicine and companion diagnostics using epigenetic targets and biomarkers is a rapidly emerging area that shows great promise in the fight against cancer.

2. Metabonomics: Understanding Human Metabolism
Dr Matthew Lewis describes how the MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre investigates what makes people metabolically different. By analyzing large cohorts of patients and performing epidemiological studies, an insight into the understanding of human metabolism can be achieved.

3. Quantitative Fluorescent Western Blotting for Protein Analysis in Neurodegenerative Diseases
Dr Tom Wishart from The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK, describes the factors involved in neurodegenerative diseases. At the protein level, quantitative fluorescent western blotting is used to analyze neurodegenerative progression, as it requires reduced sample concentrations, which can be crucial when working with precious and limited samples such as human patient samples or those from sub-cellular fractionation.

4. Personalized Medicine: The Future of Healthcare
Prof. Nicholson describes personalized medicine and how delivering the correct treatment for the right individual, based on their genes and environment, could be the future of healthcare. The use of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy enables an overview of hundreds of thousands of metabolites in a single analytical run, covering a large number of physiological and metabolic processes.

5. Biacore Technology Helps Reveal New Generation of Small Molecule Therapeutics
Dr Lawson, Vice President Structural Biology, explains how GE Healthcare’s Biacore™ technology has enabled researchers at UCB to complete pioneering studies into the properties of small molecules. Hear how the technology enables small molecule fragment library screening against antibody defined conformations of target proteins, revealing a whole new generation of small molecules which can address challenging protein-protein interactions.

6. Proprietary Stem Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease Shows Preclinical Success
Learn how the International Stem Cell Center is investigating a therapy for Parkinson ’s disease using proprietary neural stem cells. Hear about the success of the therapy in animal models and how the company hopes to proceed to clinical trials.

7. Gut Microbiome Reveals Likelihood of Genetic Diseases
Watch this video to learn about the largest funded citizen science project, American Gut. The project enables the general public to pay to have the microbiome of their gut sequenced and compared to thousands of other people. Prof. Knight is the pioneering researcher leading this work and uses techniques such as shotgun metabolomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics to determine your microbial DNA.