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 some tools are already impacting patients
Medical decision-making is often more art than science, requiring physicians to exercise judgment in the face of complex factual circumstances. But now a few tools offer the opportunity to...
Apr, 01, 2011
MICCAI 2007, the 10th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention.
What: MICCAI typically attracts over 600 world leading scientists, engineers and...
Oct, 01, 2007
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
Computer vision program rivals the human ability to rapidly recognize objects in a complex picture
Our brains can recognize most of the things we pass on an evening stroll: Cars, buildings, trees, and people all register even at a great distance or from an odd angle. Now, a new computer vision...
Jul, 01, 2007
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
How Tat crosses the lipid bilayer--with help from the bilayer.
A powerful snippet of protein called the Tat peptide ferries itself across cell membranes dragging just about anything it’s attached to along with it. How it accomplishes this feat has been a...
Jul, 01, 2008
There is growing recognition that epigenetics may be just as important as genetics in human health and disease.
In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck explained evolution as the inheritance of acquired traits; he believed that changes due to behaviors and exposures in one generation could be passed...
Jun, 01, 2010
Researchers examine the connection between editorial boards of medical informatics and bioinformatics journals
How ideas spread gets at the very fabric of scholarly research and has been studied from many different angles.
Many studies examine person-to-person connectivity in social networks. Within a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Researchers have designed a protein that, in computer simulations, induces other proteins to misfold
Inside a live cell, strings of amino acids instantaneously fold into proteins with very specific shapes. Typically, no harm is done if a protein somehow folds into an unconventional configuration....
Sep, 01, 2005