New research accepted by the Journal of Molecular Recognition confirms that a revolutionary technology developed at Wake Forest University will slash years off the time it takes to develop drugs — bringing vital new treatments to patients much more quickly.
Lab-on-Bead uses tiny beads studded with “pins” that match a drug to a disease marker in a single step, so researchers can test an infinite number of possibilities for treatments all at once. When Lab-on-Bead makes a match, it has found a viable treatment for a specific disease — speeding up drug discovery by as much as 10,000 times and cutting out years of testing and re-testing in the laboratory.
“It helps the most interesting new drugs work together to stick their heads up above the crowd,” said Jed C. Macosko, Ph.D., an associate professor of Physics at Wake Forest and primary inventor of the Lab-on-Bead technology. “Each type of drug has its own molecular barcode. Then, with the help of matching DNA barcodes on each nanoscopic bead, all the drugs of a certain type find their own ‘home’ bead and work together to make themselves known in our drug discovery process. It’s kind of like when Dr. Seuss‘s Whos down in Whoville all yelled together so that Horton the elephant and all of his friends could hear them.”
