Francis S. Collins MD, PhD, Director for NIH www.nih.gov, said “It is now possible for scientists to use DNA barcoding to distinguish one cell type from another in much the same way that a supermarket scanner recognizes different brands of cereal.
A new NIH-supported study appearing in the journal “Nature Biotechnology www.nature.com/nbt/index.html, reports that scientists are using barcoding to streamline an increasingly complex and labor intensive process for screening drugs.
This new method for barcoding is called “Profiling Relative Inhibition Simultaneously in Mixtures” (PRISM) http://directorsblog.nih.gov/tag/prism. PRISM with further refinements could help to accelerate cancer drug discovery and bring greater precision to the screening process for drugs.
In another NIH funded research effort at Tulane University http://tulane.edu, researchers have developed “Nerve-on-a-Chip” technology to improve pharmaceutical drug development. The technology uses a 3D-based model of living cells mimicking living tissue in form and function which could turn out to be an alternative to expensive animal testing.
The first research goal is to use “Nerve-on-a-Chip” to improve ways to screen chemotherapy drugs for neurotoxicity, the prime reason that patients reduce their doses or cease treatment altogether.
The research study funded by a one year $225,000 grant from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) http://ncats.nih.gov is being led by Michael J. Moore, Associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tulane University. The research is being done in collaboration with AxoSim Technologies, LLC http://axosim.com, a start-up company, co-founded in 2014 by Moore and J. Lowry Curley
According to Moore and Curley, “It is possible for a new drug interacting with “Nerve-on-a Chip” to provide data to help develop drugs faster resulting in less money being wasted on drugs that will never make it to the market.”