To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
Corning Incorporated, Life Sciences
Headquarters
Corning, N.Y.
Location(s)
Lowell, Mass. and Corning, N.Y.
Spokesperson
Jeff Mooney
Web site
About the company
Corning Life Science is a global supplier of scientific laboratory and drug-discovery products and is continually developing new products and technologies to meet tomorrow’s needs for better research and production tools. The company is currently exploring new technologies for growing cells, artificial organs and tissues, new cell-based drugs and vaccines, and stem cell therapeutics. Recent breakthroughs include the Epic System, the first high-throughput, label-free screening platform for drug discovery applications, and culture vessels with the new CellBIND Surface and Ultra-Web Synthetic Surface, which provide new substrates for researchers developing applications such as stem-cell based therapeutics or replacement tissues and organs.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
10 years ago, Corning Life Sciences had two distinct business thrusts – a services set of businesses and a business unit providing commodity products for fundamental life science research. In the late 1990's we spun out both of the services businesses, Quest Diagnostics and Covance. These divestitures allowed us to focus and innovate around the needs of fundamental and applied life science research and drug discovery. This change resulted in our becoming more engaged with our customers and better able to respond to their rapidly changing needs. Specifically, our company began to develop enabling tools for the high throughput screening market and the cell biology market.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
As a tool provider, Corning Life Sciences sees a huge challenge in providing innovative and enabling technologies to a market that is becoming more and more economically constrained. Research and technology advancements abound, but providing them as reproducible, low cost products to the market at large is becoming more difficult. From a scientific perspective, the huge challenge in drug discovery and development remains--identifying and implementing technical solutions that both shorten cycle time and reduce the gap between R&D spending and drug approval. Systems that permit the generation of more biologically relevant data (e.g. early, predictive toxicity testing, access and testing of primary cells) are going to be true enablers in the market place.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
The fact that customers in the market are continuously facing cost constraints has Corning focused on providing faster, better and more cost-effective products. However, instead of low price product initiatives, we have worked with customers to provide enabling tools that drive down their overall costs. We have maintained our focus on enabling technologies for drug screening, such as our Epic label-free system, and our focus on enabling tools for cell culture, cell scale-up, and cell assays. Our goal with these platforms is to provide tools that enable more biologically relevant information. The desire for more biologically relevant systems and the ability to analyze those systems is a large and rapidly growing market.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
Ten years from now, stem cell therapies will be main stream and gene therapy back in vogue, Personalized medicine will become a focus of drug research. Microfluidics and nanotechnologies will make their way from the bench to the bedside (and home) allowing real time diagnostic monitoring and treatment.
