Progress in Anticancer-drug Prediction Models / 中国药学杂志

In the current clinical medication, there is no method to confirm the sensitivity of patients with different genotypes to corresponding anticancer-drugs and also lack of response to side effects and drug resistance. In recent years, the development of high-throughput technology has made it possible to screen chemotherapeutic drugs on a large scale in cancer cell lines, and generated a large number of omics-data. Currently, based on these data, many predictive models of anticancer-drugs have been established, which will be helpful to predict and optimize the drug targets for cancer patients. This paper reviews the research progress of anticancer-drug prediction models.

Application of micro- and mini-bioreactors in biomedicine development and production / 生物工程学报

Micro- and mini-bioreactors are characterized by their miniature working volume and comprehensive monitoring of process data, e.g., biomass, pH, dissolved oxygen, and fluorescence that are on par with conventional bench-top systems. The technical advancements of micro- and mini-bioreactors are supported by single-use material and micro-manufacturing, non-invasive optical sensors, automation such as industrial robotics and the integration of design of experiment software with data acquisition and process control. Owing to the miniature scales, micro-bioreactors typically feature lower turbulence intensity and energy dissipation rate, resulting in different mass transfer, mixing and shear conditions as compared to industrial scale equipment. Mini-bioreactors, nevertheless, are closer to large vessels. Micro- and mini-bioreactors are used mostly in screening and process development nowadays, owing to their combined high throughput and richness of data. They are also the hardware that will enable "precision medicine" in the near future.

Weighted gene co-expression network analysis in biomedicine research / 生物工程学报

High-throughput biological technologies are now widely applied in biology and medicine, allowing scientists to monitor thousands of parameters simultaneously in a specific sample. However, it is still an enormous challenge to mine useful information from high-throughput data. The emergence of network biology provides deeper insights into complex bio-system and reveals the modularity in tissue/cellular networks. Correlation networks are increasingly used in bioinformatics applications. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) tool can detect clusters of highly correlated genes. Therefore, we systematically reviewed the application of WGCNA in the study of disease diagnosis, pathogenesis and other related fields. First, we introduced principle, workflow, advantages and disadvantages of WGCNA. Second, we presented the application of WGCNA in disease, physiology, drug, evolution and genome annotation. Then, we indicated the application of WGCNA in newly developed high-throughput methods. We hope this review will help to promote the application of WGCNA in biomedicine research.

Biotechnology in modernization of Chinese materia medica / 中草药

Chinese materia medica (CMM) plays an important role both in the disease prevention and therapy system and also in natural drug screening. Biotechnology exhibits applicable prospects in modern research of CMM with progress of natural science and technologies. Amplification fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), random amplification polymorphism of DNA (RAPD), and microsatellite DNA have been used to discriminate and breed herbal varieties. Genetic transformation and techniques of tissue and cell culture are explored to protect herbal resouces and to produce active components or parts on a commercial scale. High throughput technologies of proteome and biochip are expected to probe molecular targets and routes of CMM with the changes of proteome and gene expression. The results can be helpful to novel drug development and secondary exploitation, so as to promote the modernization process of CMM.