Aggressive Self Promotion Just Might Be the Scientific Community's Saving Grace

After applications and processes, workflow optimization is the primary consideration when setting up a cell culture lab. Workflow relates to how samples and cultures move through the lab, the number of operations going on simultaneously, and chain of custody.

In this Q & A, three experts from both academia and industry discuss the types of cell culture they perform in their labs, technologies they use, and the challenges they face.

As Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan famously noted, “The medium is the message.” So it is with cell culture, where media and feed or supplementation strategies have been responsible for more improvement in cell productivity and performance than any other factors.

Isolating facility and layout from equipment during planning and maintenance of a cell culture lab
entails considerable risk, if for no other reason than the latter must fit into the former.

Although cell culture is more than 100 years old, it has only been applied to the manufacture of biological drugs for about 25 years. Today mammalian cell culture is the workhorse production platform for most of biotech’s protein therapeutics and increasingly for cell- and virus-based vaccines.

Conflict and disagreement are not always bad. In fact, they are essential to high-performing work teams.

Unfortunately in the world of business, whether it’s in the sciences or any other large global industry, managers don’t have the luxury of being able to sit back, analyze the workplace every four years, and understand just a portion of what’s going on in the competition.

Alexander Sherman, director of systems in the Department of Neurology and director of strategic development and systems at the Neurological Clinical Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses why the right choice and setup for data collecting, data handling, and data sharing infrastructure is important to help establish successful research collaborations.

In this month’s cover story, author John Borchardt describes the changes that have taken place since 2008 in priorities for hiring new laboratory employees.

Problem: There is little doubt that cell-based assays are becoming a mainstay across the pre-clinical drug discovery process. Many of these assays are end-point based, where live cells are cultured in microplates, incubated with compounds of