A Dandenong engineering company is helping to accelerate the pace of medical science at the Australian Synchrotron.
A specialist manufacturer of one-off parts for V8 supercar teams, Flexicut has begun making sample holders that will speed up the development of drugs to treat cancer, HIV-AIDS and other major diseases.
Researchers from around the world can use the sample holders, called pucks, to carry their samples to the Australian Synchrotron, where the pucks slot straight into a robot-controlled system for a technique called x-ray crystallography (macromolecular crystallography or ‘MX’ for short).
This new advance will make it much easier for researchers to analyse their samples online from the comfort of their own laboratories around Australia or overseas, speeding up the development of new drugs and improving our knowledge of how to treat diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, blood clotting disorders, diabetes, transplant rejection, and many more.