About us

BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH IS THE BROAD AREA OF SCIENCE THAT LOOKS for ways to prevent and treat diseases that cause illness and death in people and in animals. This general field of research includes many areas of both the life and physical sciences.

Utilizing biotechnology techniques, biomedical researchers study biological processes and diseases with the ultimate goal of developing effective treatments and cures. Biomedical research is an evolutionary process requiring careful experimentation by many scientists, including biologists and chemists. Discovery of new medicines and therapies requires careful scientific experimentation, development, and evaluation.

The research process is a complicated, time-consuming, and costly one whose end result is never known at the outset. Discovering a new drug has been linked to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Literally hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of chemical compounds must be made and tested to find one that can achieve the desirable result without too-serious side effects.

The complexity of the process can be gauged, in part, by the diversity of scientific disciplines engaged in finding new drugs. Traditional organic chemists, physiologists and statisticians have been joined in recent years by new kinds of specialists. Biochemists study the chemistry of life processes. Molecular biologists study the molecules that make up living matter. Toxicologists investigate chemicals' potential for harm. Pharmacologists look at how drugs work. And computer scientists apply the power of their sophisticated machines to analyze and assess new chemicals. Each provides a different way of looking for that needle.

Such a complicated process costs vast amounts of time and money. FDA estimates that, on average, it takes ten years to study and test a new drug before the agency can approve it for the general public. That includes early laboratory and animal testing, as well as later clinical trials using human subjects.

Therefore, the basic and clinical research laboratories in the Universities and Research Institutions require the biological materials for their biomedical research.