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Our key technologies are our flagship - whether automation or nucleic acids.
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The locations of LSR member companies are spread all over Germany, including in your area.
At first glance, some of the equipment used in the laboratory is familiar to us from everyday life: Refrigerators, freezers, scales. But the requirements and standards in the laboratory are much higher. Microbalances can precisely determine a weight of less than a millionth of a gram. Temperature-sensitive samples and reagents must be stored in special freezers at a temperature of -80 °C. Elsewhere, tanks filled with liquid nitrogen are used, allowing samples to be stored at a temperature of -196 °C.
However, most of the products and technologies used in the laboratory are only known to the scientific community. Some of these technologies have been in use for many decades and are constantly being developed further. They help scientific staff in their day-to-day laboratory work and have become an integral part of the laboratory. Other technologies have only emerged as innovations in recent years.
In order to shed some light on everyday laboratory work and beyond, important technologies in the LSR sector that almost everyone working in science has already used are described below. Furthermore, approaches with future potential are shown that have emerged from them.
Molecular biology is the field of biology that deals with the formation, structure and function of nucleic acids. Nucleic acids include deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA for deoxyribonucleic acid) and ribonucleic acid (RNA for ribonucleic acid). There are other variations of both nucleic acids, whose abbreviations stand for different functions in the cell. The mRNA, for example, is the messenger RNA that fulfills a function of information transfer in the cell. In the mRNA vaccines used for the first time in the coronavirus pandemic, it fulfills the same function - it transmits information to the body about the blueprint of a virus component. In the current case, this is information about the blueprint for the spike protein of the coronavirus.
Employees of LSR companies have enormous expertise in the field of molecular biology, which has made the companies a reliable partner for research, diagnostics and therapy since the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it is identifying the pathogen, supplying medical diagnostic laboratories with PCR reagents and equipment or supporting the research and development of mRNA-based and vector-based vaccines - molecular biology would be inconceivable without LSR companies.
The general public is unaware of how rocky the road to a new drug is. It often takes more than a decade from development to approval, and in hundreds of individual steps, a single substance is ultimately identified as effective and safe from up to 10,000 substances. It starts with the search for a suitable drug candidate and ends with the final approval.
LSR technologies are one of the cornerstones of drug research. Many products and technologies are used up to the preclinical phase and thus cover the phases from basic research to the testing of new drug candidates in cell cultures and animal models.
The first step is often taken as part of university research projects investigating the development of diseases. Scientists focus on the identification of biomolecular targets that play an important role in the disease process.
An early example of modern drug research was the discovery of HIV protease inhibitors, which have been used in AIDS therapy since the mid-1990s. Proteases can cut protein sequences at a defined point. If a substance attaches itself to the protease and thus inhibits the cutting function of the protease, it is referred to as an inhibitor.
LSR technologies are described below, which help to quickly identify suitable drug candidates, validate their efficacy and rule out possible toxicity.
LSR technologies for large sample volumes - high throughput through automation
Laboratory work is often time-consuming. It is not uncommon for individual experiments to take up to a week, even for just a handful of samples. If you multiply the number of samples by 1,000 or even 10,000, not only does it quickly become confusing, but scheduling also gets out of hand. However, this number of samples is not uncommon, especially when you think of drug screening in pharmaceutical research. Initially, so-called substance libraries are used, which can contain tens of thousands of substances. This is necessary in order to find suitable candidates with the desired efficacy in the first phase of drug research.
The so-called High Throughput Screening (HTS) process facilitates the screening of active ingredients and makes complex sample analysis on a large scale possible through automation and robotics. At the same time, this also reduces costs. This further optimizes research.
LSR device manufacturers are also bringing automated devices onto the market that transfer monotonous process steps such as pipetting from the hands of laboratory staff to robots. These devices can be adapted to individual procedures and protocols down to the smallest step - far beyond mere pipetting. This turns robots into specialized helpers in everyday laboratory work.
In addition, further developments in the field of microscopy and sequencing also include high-throughput procedures: More and more samples can be analyzed simultaneously in newer devices. The following articles show examples of LSR technologies.
LSR technologies are often used in medical diagnostics laboratories. SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is just one example of the transformation of an original LSR technology into widespread use in routine medical diagnostics.
Further developments of LSR technologies, often through a combination with other devices or technologies, enable further advances in the laboratory medical repertoire. Chromatography and mass spectrometry, for example, originated in biological and chemical laboratories and are now used in combination (liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry coupling, HPLC-MS) for drug tests or toxicological analyses.
LSR technologies also set the pace in the development and establishment of advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs). These do not include traditional active substance-based drugs, but gene therapeutics (e.g. CAR T-cell therapies), cell therapeutics and biotechnologically processed tissue products (tissue-engineered products). ATMPs open up new possibilities for previously untreatable or insufficiently treatable diseases. As of June 2022, eleven gene therapeutics, one cell therapeutic and two bioengineered tissue products have been approved in the EU.
Various LSR technologies are described below that have either already made the leap into routine diagnostics and application as a novel therapy or are still in development and awaiting a breakthrough.
Wir leben Forschung
LSR brochure 2022
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