Bio-IT World | The emergence of organ-on-a-chip systems to expedite drug discovery and toxicology studies is a process more than three decades in the making.

• COPE-WEL study aims to validate Headstart® test for early detection and monitoring of pulmonary exacerbation of COPD
• Headstart is a non-invasive self-test that detects lung biomarkers in the urine
• Observational, multi-centre validation trial carried out in collaboration with a consortium of leading clinicians and clinical centres

Bio-IT World | A new testing technology is of great interest to pharmaceutical companies looking to better understand the effects of medicines—especially the unintended consequences of their administration—and will facilitate study of not only toxicity, but also the mechanism by which drugs work and the timing of their delivery and physiological response.

Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | To combat the waste of life science research, Sridhar Iyengar advocates building comprehensive lab monitoring and information systems that, using "AI", can "correlate fluctuations in many different variables" to deviations in observed results. There is, however, another completely different approach to tease out from the "myriad factors": factorial experimentation, in particular, 2-level screening experiments.

Bio-IT World News Brief | Last week Weill Cornell Medicine and Oxford Nanopore published a pre-print describing Pore-C, a new nanopore sequencing technique which couples chromatin conformation capture with Oxford Nanopore Technologies long reads to directly sequence multi-way chromatin contacts without amplification.