Science Careers

Although it is highly rewarding to create medicines, particularly therapeutic antibodies, doing so comes with several risks. It is expensive, time-consuming, and often has a high failure rate. As such, any technique that can minimize costs and time while also increasing success is considered the holy grail in biotechnology.

Coupled with advances in liquid handling, bioinformatics, and antibody expression and characterization, high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) and single-cell B-cell receptor sequencing (BCR-seq) are driving the unprecedented scale, scope, and speed of biologics development. We will discuss antibody discovery by immunizing transgenic mice engineered to produce antibodies with human variable region heavy and light chains, and by using high-throughput B cell selection employing single cell sorting, Beacon®, or Nanovial Technology. These workflows maintain native pairings and output a diverse final set of binders encompassing a variety of clonotypes and heavy and light chain genes.

HT-SPR enables the evaluation of the largest of antigen–antibody interactions quickly and cost-effectively. It can also run parallel kinetic, affinity, and epitope specificity studies from the very start of the drug discovery process. scRNA-seq is a versatile tool for understanding cell types, cell states, and developmental trajectories in a diverse range of tissues and organisms. Increasingly, it is being harnessed to understand adaptive immune responses and facilitate a new paradigm of drug discovery.

During the webinar, our expert speakers will:

• Share a robust method for antigen-specific antibody identification, including current industry advances
• Help you understand cell types, cell states, and developmental workflows using BCR-seq or scRNA-seq
• Discuss how high-throughput biophysical screening, epitope binning, and mapping are allowing therapeutic candidate selection from crude samples
• Answer your questions during our live Q&A format.

This webinar will last for approximately 60 minutes.

The term “artificial intelligence” is everywhere, but what does it mean and how can it affect us in a practical sense? AI is already impacting many parts of our daily lives; it’s found in everything from facial recognition systems to navigation software that helps us avoid traffic backups. In the realm of health care, its use is less obvious but can often be critical to saving lives. Join our panel of distinguished guests as they guide us through this complex topic, helping us understand the important role that AI plays in the health care space today, where its opportunities and deficiencies lie, and what the future might hold if current challenges can be overcome.

During the webinar, the panelists will:

• Outline the technologies comprising AI—including machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks—and the role that each plays in making AI work
• Discuss a range of case studies illustrating the application of AI in health care, including successes, failures, and learning opportunities
• Attempt to provide a sense of what a future, AI-integrated world of more rapid, accurate, and reliable medical care might look like
• Answer your questions during the live broadcast.

This webinar will last for approximately 60 minutes.

Single-cell genomics has progressed rapidly over the last decade since the development of single-cell DNA-sequencing (scDNA-seq) and single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) methods. The development of high-throughput systems such as nanowells, microdroplets, and microfluidic platforms has enabled thousands of cells to be sequenced in parallel—reducing costs to less than USD 1 per cell. Single-cell sequencing (SCS) methods offer many advantages over traditional “bulk” DNA-seq and RNA-seq approaches, which are limited to providing a mixed signal that represents many cell types in the microenvironment or an amalgamation of tumor clones with different genotypes.

SCS has impacted many areas of cancer research, improving our understanding of invasion in premalignant disease, intratumor heterogeneity, the tumor microenvironment, metastasis, and therapeutic resistance. Several areas of cancer medicine will be transformed by SCS, including early-detection diagnostics and risk stratification, drug target discovery, targeting the microenvironment, targeting tumor clones, and noninvasive monitoring. In the same way that next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have transformed modern oncology over the last decade, SCS methods will impact many areas of cancer research and will become a common tool in cancer centers.

This webinar discusses several cancer research studies, including a case study involving a rare form of melanoma in which resident memory T cells changed their responses after immune checkpoint blockade as well as another study that documents tissue-resident populations in breast cancer patients. Emerging technologies and future clinical applications that are bound to transform cancer research and medicine will also be mentioned.

During the webinar, viewers will:

• Learn about current and emerging SCS technologies
• Hear how SCS has changed cancer research and medicine
• Learn how SCS technologies were applied to study both melanoma and breast cancer
• Be able to submit their questions to the experts during the live broadcast.

This webinar will last for approximately 60 minutes.