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
How cell-centered models are adding fundamental insights into our understanding of cell behaviors
The cell is like our financial system: Even if you have a diagram of all the complex interactions going on, you still cannot intuit how the whole system will react when perturbed. Indeed, the cell...
Apr, 01, 2010
Six startups jockey for a place at the table. Who will succeed?
A handful of startups are wagering that genome interpretation is the next big thing.
Why is this business space so hot? “Once you can produce a better faster genome, thanks...
Jun, 20, 2013
The study of HIV evolution is not only critical to fighting the virus; it has also driven advances in the computational tools used to study evolution in general.
When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it would be decades before HIV would jump from monkeys to humans and set off a devastating worldwide pandemic. But evolution is at the heart of...
Jul, 01, 2009
The flu virus is an evolutionary marvel. Teams of experts design an appropriate flu vaccine annually just to keep up with the microbe’s ability to evade the human immune system. Multiple...
Jul, 01, 2006
A closer look at the curation of models discussed in The Physiome: A Mission Imperative
Multi-scale quantitative models need to be validated and reproducible if they are to be useful for clinical workflows, says Hunter. The Physiome infrastructure developed by Hunter, Dr Poul Nielsen...
Jun, 01, 2010
Bringing models closer to reality
When the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia launched on January 16, 2003, a large piece of foam fell off and hit the left wing. Alerted of the impact, NASA engineers used a computer model to predict...
Oct, 19, 2012
Computation offers a window into a disease often described as a black box
The growing threats of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) are spurring worldwide interest in faster and more innovative research approaches, such as...
Jun, 06, 2012
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
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