Incremental progress and measured successes
Personalized cancer therapy is now a reality. A handful of tumor-classifying tests and targeted drugs are in widespread clinical use; and early attempts are underway to match high-risk cancer...
Jan, 02, 2012
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
Finding the Master Regulators
A cell may change states several times in its lifetime—from a stem cell to a specialized cell, for example, or from a normal cell to a cancerous one. Each time this happens, a veritable army of...
Apr, 01, 2010
Decades of steady progress in pharmacogenetics have unearthed hundreds of associations between genes and drug response. But the field has to solve some theoretical and practical issues before it can deliver on the promise of personalized drug therapy.
As algorithms go, it’s deceptively simple. Just add together eight weighted pieces of patient information—age, height, weight, race, data about two genes, and a pair of clinical...
Jul, 01, 2009
The Human Genome Project has spurred extraordinary developments in our ability to characterize cellular systems in high-throughput fashion. Polymorphism, methylation, gene expression, and proteomics...
Apr, 01, 2008