J-KEM Scientific And Naturally Derived Pharmaceuticals
In collaboration with nature and outstanding research, J-KEM can make a difference in the world through medicinal discovery and creation. J-KEM’s products can be used by academic and industrial scientists who are searching for or creating new drugs with which to treat as yet untamed or poorly managed diseases. Our instrument controllers can be used in artificial synthesis, we could build robotic systems for high throughput analysis. And in one case, we built a custom syringe pump set up that allowed a library of natural material to quickly and cost-effectively prepare samples for further testing.
This library is called NatureBank; it’s hosted by the Griffith Institute of Drug Discovery (formerly Eskitis Institute) in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It holds 45,000 samples from natural, including fauna from Australia, China, and Papua New Guinea, marine invertebrates from Australia and Malaysia, and land invertebrates from Australia. From the natural product sources, the library consists of isolated compounds through complex means involving solvents and high performance liquid phase chromatography. At this point, the compounds can be screened for their usefulness pharmaceutically.
Isolating the samples using these complex processes is daunting and potentially time-consuming. J-KEM’s custom 16-position syringe pump is key for the initial part of the process, the basic extractions. The outstanding performance of J-KEM’s pumps sped up the processing time by a factor of 24! That’s going from 117 8-hour work days to 10 work days; thus the promising compounds they find are accessible to researchers much sooner, and because of J-KEM’s work, the process is more cost efficient. The NatureBank reports that anti-parasitic and anticancer possibilities have been found so far, and who knows what will be found in the future.
For a more in-depth look, check out these book chapters in Chemical Genomics and Marine Biomedicine: From Beach to Bedside.