Over 70% of drugs that seem promising in animal studies fail when tested in humans. Organ-on-a-chip technology could radically change this picture. whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/scie… Designed with cells from the human body, as this series of tweets show #Organonachips have taken many decades to materialise, starting with John Syer Bristoe’s idea for an artificial organ in 1876

1. Billions of patients have now received #mRNA #COVIDvaccines. First found in 1956 by Elliot Volkin and Lazarus Astrachan, this series of tweets covers the many decades it took for mRNA to emerge as a medical tool whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/scie… 2. The development of #mRNA for medical applications was not a smooth linear path and involved many different players, a number of whom struggled to get recognition and funding for their work and faced bruising patent battles.

1. A quarter of the world’s total #SARS-Cov2 virus genomes have been sequenced on @nanopore devices. First sketched out as an idea here by David Deamer in 1989 this series of tweets covers the long history of nanopore sequencing. 2. Taking 25 years to fully materialise the development of nanopore sequencing has involved close collaboration between academia and industry and many actors from different disciplines and backgrounds. Each has their own story to tell.
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Happy International women’s day. To celebrate #IWD we are sharing a series of tweets with the profile of different #WomeninScience who through the ages have played a significant, but often forgotten role, in biomedical science and healthcare Our first profile is that of Agelina Fanny Hesse (1850-1934), an overlooked heroine of modern microbiology who was the first to propose the use of arar, in 1881 to grow bacteria which is now used everywhere as a means to study and identify microbes. whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhi…
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While COVID19 is grabbing world attention, another global public health threat is still rising in the wings - #AMR. By 2050 AMR could cause 10 million deaths if left unchecked. AMR is not new and its history stretches back long before penicillin. whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhi… /1 The first case of drug resistance was noted in 1907 by #PaulEhrlich, when he observed mice infected with Trypanosoma brucei developed resistance with repeated doses of #Salvarsan, the first compound found to have antimicrobial activity. whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhi… /2