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
How errors in data, software, and methodology can teach us how to do better
In 2006, a paper in Nature Medicine suggested a novel and potentially revolutionary method for predicting patient responses to cancer therapies using gene signatures. The finding piqued the interest...
Sep, 01, 2011
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Less than meets the eye ...
Oct, 05, 2012
A ten-year, $600-million program known as the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) has already, in its five year pilot phase, greatly increased the speed at which protein structures can be determined,...
Jun, 01, 2005
How social media sites are rapidly doing unique research on large cohorts
It has become commonplace for people to use social media to share their healthcare stories, seek a community of individuals with the same diseases, and learn about treatment options. All this...
Jan, 02, 2012
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 Fall 2005 “Under the Hood” column discussed the curse of dimensionality—too many numerical components for each data point—and the curse of dataset sparsity—too few...
Oct, 01, 2010
iHOP organizes interconnected information
Text-mining tools such as iHOP (Information Hyperlinked Over Proteins) are doing for biological literature what hyperlinks and search engines do for the Internet: organizing interconnected...
Apr, 01, 2007
Mutual information (MI) is defined in information theory as a measure of the dependencies between two random variables. There are many biomedical applications in which it is beneficial to quantify...
Jul, 01, 2007
A robot that develops hypotheses of its own
Robots already have a place in many labs, automating tedious tasks such as pipetting samples. But a new system designed at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom has taken laboratory automation...
Jul, 01, 2009