Development of a Body of Knowledge for the Clinical Bioinformatician: Perspectives from the Association for Molecular Pathology's Clinical Genomics Bioinformatician Body of Knowledge Steering Committee.

The use of next-generation sequencing and other high-throughput technologies in the clinical molecular diagnostics laboratory requires the application of bioinformatics pipelines and other computational tools to analyze, visualize, and store these clinical data. Clinical bioinformaticians, individuals with the skills to develop, validate, and deploy these tools in a clinical setting, are needed to ensure that these molecular diagnostic technologies can be appropriately used for clinical care. Building on existing expertise in informatics, next-generation sequencing, and clinical molecular diagnostics, the Association for Molecular Pathology has generated a series to establish an initial clinical bioinformatician body of knowledge.

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy driving the future of loaded mesoporous silica imaging.

This study reports the use of variants of coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy as a novel method for improved physicochemical characterization of drug-loaded silica particles. Ordered mesoporous silica is a biomaterial that can be loaded to carry a number of biochemicals, including poorly water-soluble drugs, by allowing the incorporation of drug into nanometer-sized pores. In this work, the loading of two poorly water-soluble model drugs, itraconazole and griseofulvin, in MCM-41 silica microparticles is characterized qualitatively, using the novel approach of CARS microscopy, which has advantages over other analytical approaches used to date and is non-destructive, rapid, label free, confocal and has chemical and physical specificity.

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy visualizes pharmaceutical tablets during dissolution.

Traditional pharmaceutical dissolution tests determine the amount of drug dissolved over time by measuring drug content in the dissolution medium. This method provides little direct information about what is happening on the surface of the dissolving tablet. As the tablet surface composition and structure can change during dissolution, it is essential to monitor it during dissolution testing.

Distribution of binder in granules produced by means of twin screw granulation.

According to the quality by design principle processes may not remain black-boxes and full process understanding is required. The granule size distribution of granules produced via twin screw granulation is often found to be bimodal. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of binder distribution within granules produced via twin screw granulation in order to investigate if an inhomogeneous spread of binder is causing this bimodal size distribution.