Despite its importance in the regulation of many cellular processes, membrane tension is still complicated to measure. And despite valuable insights, the techniques currently available remain complex and present technical limitations. To overcome these drawbacks, Spirochrome have developed Flipper-TR, the first probes for fluorescence microscopy in the field of mechanobiology, that specifically targets the plasma membrane of cells and reports membrane tension through changes in its fluorescence lifetime.

Due to their involvement as checkpoints in immune cell responses, Sialic-acid-binding ImmunoGlobulin-like Lectins (Siglecs) have gained more and more interest as therapeutic targets in Immuno-Oncology and Immune regulation. You’ll be interested to learn that BPS Bioscience have developed and released a number of Siglec proteins and stable cell lines, which you can obtain in Europe through tebu-bio.

Synthetic mRNA is indeed the highway for today’s therapeutics, whether you’re working on developing new drugs against cancer targets, or whether you aim to develop new vaccines, Covid-19 being one of them. So, how can you obtain your mRNA within just a few weeks, ready to explore these potential applications? Read on to see how we can help you achieve this.

As detailed in a separate post, bit.bio have developed a novel cellular reprogramming technology, opti-ox™¹ (optimized inducible overexpression), that can generate functional cells with high consistency from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). opti-ox overcomes gene silencing and enables controlled expression of transcription factors, and as a result, deterministic induction of a new cell identity. The resulting mature cells are physiologically relevant and phenotypically characterised, and for the first time, available at scale, offering predictive, in vitro, cells for research and drug screening.

Here we’ll be taking a closer look at the products already available for researchers. As the technology can be applied to generate many other mature cell types, more will be coming soon, including CNS cells, immune cells, and cells for toxicology and disease modelling.

The first human iPSC-derived products developed using opti-ox are the ioGlutamatergic Neurons and ioSkeletal Myocytes, which are both available across Europe through tebu-bio. There will be more to follow…