Propelled into the spotlight by the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA has become a biological entity of great interest in drug discovery – yet mRNA vaccines are just the promising beginning, leading to more and more discoveries and applications. mRNA demonstrates high potential to cure numerous other diseases, as we invite you to discover in this post – let’s take a look at a number of other mRNA based applications with active R&D, establishing mRNA beyond a current trend.

The islets of Langerhans are the regions of the pancreas that contain its endocrine (i.e., hormone-producing) cells. Discovered in 1869 by German pathological anatomist Paul Langerhans, the islets of Langerhans constitute approximately 1% to 2% of the mass of the pancreas. There are about one million islets distributed throughout the pancreas of a healthy adult human. Each is separated from the surrounding pancreatic tissue by a thin fibrous connective tissue capsule. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which secrete insulin, and play a significant role in diabetes.

Islets are widely used for transplantation to restore beta cell function from diabetes, offering an alternative to a complete pancreas transplantation or an artificial pancreas. Because the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans are selectively destroyed by an autoimmune process in type 1 diabetes, islet transplantation is a means of restoring physiological beta cell function in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Human Islets for Research (HIR)® are primary human islets processed from organ donor pancreases that have been approved for research but not for clinical transplantation of either the  pancreas or the isolated islets. HIR® are obtained in a proprietary process of pancreas digestion and islet purification that results in uniformly high quality HIR® for delivery to diabetes  investigators. Quality Control (QC) testing is routinely performed prior to release to assure uniform quality and function of these islets available for research.

With the great success of the SIR-probes for efficient labeling of the cell Cytoskeleton, DNA and Lysosome, Spirochrome have just launched a series of 10 new live cell fluorescent tools : The SPY^TM probes.

Developed by Epicypher and available in Europe through tebu-bio, CUTANA CUT&RUN and its sister technology CUT&TAG are quickly becoming the preferred approaches for Chromatin Mapping experiments over the classical method ChiP-Seq. To supplement these advances, EpiCypher is also leading the way for the validation of highly specific antibodies to histone PTMs for chromatin profiling assays. Let’s see how these new antibodies are validated.