Top 5
Innovations
From a speedy molecular check for COVID-19 to equipment that
could characterize the antibodies produced within the plasma of sufferers
convalescing from the disorder, these 12 months' winners reflect the research
network's shared cognizance in a challenging year.
We recognize the vintage noticed: necessity is the mother of invention.Well, 2020 has proven to us that an international pandemic is one extreme mother. Typically, our Top 5 Innovations competition focuses on laboratory technology, gear designed to plumb the mysteries of basic biology. But as biologists turned their points of interest to knowledge SARS-CoV-2, the innovation panorama modified for that reason, with new tools developed and existing technology bent to cope with the pandemic. So these 12 months at The Scientist, our annual contest includes innovations aimed at information and, in the end, solving the COVID-19 trouble.
Among our unbiased judges' picks for 2020s Top 10 Innovations had been core laboratory technologies—along with a single-mobile proteome analyzer and a desktop gene synthesizer—alongside pandemic-focused products, together with a speedy COVID-19 test, a tool that could capture antibody profiles from the blood plasma of recuperating coronavirus patients, and a platform for characterizing glycans inside the spike protein that studs the floor of SARS-CoV-2. The opposition amongst stellar submissions turned so steep that this 12 months Top 10 definitely contains 12 products, way to a couple of ties.
As challenging as 2020 has been for everybody, this tumultuous year has given a start to promising merchandise and approaches for elucidating the complicated global of biology. And even more than that, 2020 has proven that the clinical community, whilst confronted with a shared hassle, can rise to the challenge and are available together to refocus, studies, and innovate. Here, The Scientist offers the gear and technologies that make up this yr's Top 10 Innovations.
AbCellera Celium
In overdue March, biotech company AbCellera hosted a name with 40 researchers to check the statistics they'd accumulated on capability antibodies towards SARS-CoV-2. Using AbCellera's excessive-throughput microfluidics and unmarried-mobile evaluation gear to probe samples of COVID-19 sufferers, the business enterprise's group had deciphered the genetic sequences encoding hundreds of antibodies that would treat the ailment. Sifting through all of that information with the aid of hand become tedious, though, so the team fed it into Celium, a statistics visualization tool that intersects more than a million notable information factors for those antibodies to expose which ones would possibly paintings quality in sufferers as an ability remedy. In actual time, on the decision, the researchers used Celium to probe those relationships and domestic in at the LY-CoV555 antibody that, months later, entered scientific trials as a possible COVID-19 treatment, says Maia Smith, lead of facts visualization at AbCellera and writer of Celium. "I suppose that type of says all of it."
Before Celium got here in the marketplace in 2017, scientists running with AbCellera to find antibodies might get lower back complicated spreadsheets of data that have been tough to navigate, and it becomes hard to understand in which to start, Smith says. Using Celium, facts are provided in a visual layout and the tool "allows you become aware of the proper molecule to your wishes," Fernando Corrêa, a protein engineer at Kodiak Sciences in Palo Alto, California, tells The Scientist. He's partnered with AbCellera to perceive antibodies to treat retinal illnesses and says the business enterprise's package of microfluidics, unmarried-cell evaluation, and records visualization tool "streamlines the procedure of antibody discovery in a consumer-pleasant way."
KAMAR: "AbCellera response to the pandemic underscores
the actual power of the Celium platform at the intersection of biology and AI
to make new antibody discoveries at a blazing velocity."