The research that goes into Drug Discovery, or the search for new potential medications, is an extensive process through which new therapeutic entities are identified and extensively studied. How therapeutics produce their targeted effects, is examined from the tissue level to the cellular level and all the way to the structural level, where structural information provide invaluable insights on the atomic interactions between a drug and its target. This information is exploited in optimizing a drug’s potency while reducing its off-target effects. JEOL Cryo-Electron Microscopes and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometers are instrumental in structure-based drug design, while JEOL Scanning Electron Microscopes aid with quality control aspects of this field.
The
JEOL CRYO ARM is accelerating drug discovery and development of novel therapeutics with its stability, ultrahigh throughput and resolution, and unattended operation. The CRYO ARM routinely produces near-atomic resolution 3-dimensional structures of proteins, biological macromolecules and assemblies allowing researchers to develop targeted therapeutics. The increasing resolution achieved with the CRYO ARM has been reported in an extensive bibliography. In 2023 a 1.19A structure of apoferritin, a protein found in the intestinal mucosa membrane, was reported by Maki-Yonekura et al, demonstrating that the JEOL CRYO ARM can produce structures at true atomic resolution.
Until the resolution revolution of Transmission Electron Microscopy, the ability to solve high resolution biological structures was only possible using a diffraction technique, X-ray Crystallography. Now a novel technique,
MicroED, borrows from X-ray crystallography but uses electrons as the incident beam, allowing atomic details to be acquired from much smaller crystals, as small as 200nm or less in size. The JEOL CRYO ARM is fully equipped with a diffraction beam setting, a beam stopper, and an ultra-stable rotating stage for microED data collection.