Researchers developing a new vaccine currently have no direct way of predicting its efficacy short of exposing patients to the disease. A new study that combines gene expression data with advanced...
Apr, 01, 2009
Getting the molecular dynamics car out of the garage
For those who are not practitioners of dynamical simulation methods, such as molecular dynamics (MD), one of the biggest misconceptions relates to time. Specifically, the mismatch between the...
Jun, 19, 2013
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
Transparent peer review, replication studies, and journals of negative results all suggest change is on the horizon
As I was writing this editorial, I learned about yet another scientific paper being retracted. This time it was a genetics paper in Science, one of the hundreds of retractions that the blog...
Sep, 01, 2011
For a century, neuroscientists have dissected, traced, eavesdropped on, and are now compiling a seemingly endless cast of players in the nervous system. As we keep gathering more and more molecular...
Apr, 01, 2009
No two cancer patients respond identically to treatment. Some will be cured while others will see their cancer return, and physicians are at a loss to explain why. Now, using MRI imaging researchers...
Oct, 01, 2009
Can the complexities of biology be boiled down to Amazon.com-style recommendations? The examples here suggest possible pathways to an intelligent healthcare system with big data at its core.
“We have recommendations for you,” announces the website Amazon.com each time a customer signs in.
This mega-retailer analyzes billions of customers’ purchases—nearly $...
Jan, 02, 2012
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
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
The National Institutes of Health are on a mission: To understand and tackle the problems of human health. To make that daunting problem approachable, 15 of the 20 institutes divvy up human health...
Oct, 05, 2012