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French German Team Refutes Standard Model of Electroporation

Black cones show water molecules being oriented in the electric field at the interface with the lipid. Credit: Carlos Marques, ENS Lyon

Powerful electric fields have the ability to generate pores in biological membranes through a process called electroporation. Deliberately inducing these imperfections in membranes is a crucial technique not only in medicine and biotechnology but also in the treatment of food items.

A Franco-German research team, headed by Dr. Carlos Marques from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and Prof. Dr. Jan Behrends from the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, has recently collected data that casts fundamental doubt on what has been accepted for decades as the standard model of this mechanism.

“This is a challenge for theory building and numerical simulations in this field,” says Marques. The results have now been published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the United States

STAT’s Matthew Herper struck an industry nerve when he wrote that the drug development industry is “not prepared for the next wave of biotech innovation.”

His report ends on a somewhat dismal note: the industry is long on diagnosis (clinical development is too expensive) and short on cures.

For an industry based on science and evidence, a good way to understand a complex situation like this is to test different scenarios in a simple model. Building on prior work by others in the field, we created such a model to help inform the much-needed debate that Herper’s article kickstarted.

To be sure, “All models are wrong,” as George Box once mischievously said, “but some are useful.” We believe this is one of the useful ones, and we invite readers to explore its implications with us.

Recent events and biopharma productivity

The productivity of new-drug research and development is poor

Maya Ninth Wave

Tag: model

New Research Casts Fundamental Doubt on Long-Established Standard Model of Electroporation

A biopharma business model for biology’s century

Recent events and biopharma productivity