The human Flap Endonuclease 1 (a.k.a. hFEN1) is a structure-specific nuclease involved in DNA replication and repair. This nuclease is thought to be a potential therapeutic target for treating cancers (e.g. chemosensitization, synthetic lethality) hence, the need for discovering and characterizing new hFEN1 inhibitors.

The Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) affects the development of drugs for all pathologies (brain exposure to drugs, side effects…). In the early phases of drug development, there is a strong need for stable and fully characterized human brain endothelial cellular models that might mimic the molecular and cellular interactions between the blood and the brain in vitro.

Let’s take a look at a brain endothelial cell line with proven applications in drug discovery: the hCMEC/D3 Human Cerebral Microvascular Endothelial Cell Line.

If you’re studying human pulmonary function and pathophysiology, you need access to validated, highly characterised, human airway cellular models. A large collection of these cells is available for applications in asthma, inhalation toxicology and pulmonary inflammatory response. Let’s take a look at a selection of different pulmonary cell types I would advise, to boost your in vitro research in this area.

Many labs have adopted the CRISPR genome editing technology to make knock-out and knock-in cell lines.

This technology produces first a targeted break in genomic DNA, which can then be exploited to produce cell lines with genes knocked out or where a donor vector has been used to introduce new genetic elements (point mutants, fluorescent tags, antibiotic resistance cassettes, etc.). Essentially any desired modification to the cells genome can be made. In setting up these genome editing projects there are many choices to be made including vector for the Cas9 protein and for the sgRNAs. Perhaps the most difficult choice, however, can be which cell line to use. Even the most affordable stable genome editing cell line development services can come with a significant cost, so choosing the right cell line at the beginning is crucial. Here we explain some of the choices researchers have in setting up their CRISPR genome editing projects and give our advice for cell line selection.