Computation helps evaluate the nature of the NIH research portfolio in ways that were previously very difficult.
What biomedical research does the federal government fund? How is it allocated across important diseases? Has that changed over time? Answering these questions at any level of detail is tougher than...
Jun, 08, 2012
How increased coverage of the structure space is transforming the field of biology
When the human genome was completely sequenced in 2003, researchers were already pondering how biomedicine could make use of it. One hope was that the sequences would lead to a greater...
Jan, 01, 2010
Profiles in Computer Science Courage Part I: Reflections on the rewards of plunging into biomedicine
Interviews with Leonidas Guibas, Ron Shamir, Michael Black, David Haussler, Daphne Koller, Erin Halperin, Gene Myers, Paul Groth and Bruce Donald
To a computer scientist, the fields of biology and medicine can seem like the vast Pacific Ocean, says Leonidas Guibas, PhD, professor of computer science at Stanford University. “You go to the...
Apr, 01, 2011
An exploration of data-driven and process-driven approaches to data privacy
Trust. It’s the basis of every patient/physician interaction: Shared personal health information is kept confidential and used only for the patient’s benefit. It’s a tradition that...
Jan, 02, 2012
Many a successful investigator working at the interface between molecular biology, genetics and computation will recognize the imperative to obtain biological validation for computational...
Jul, 01, 2008
The clear winner: Big Data
Several biomedical computing projects received big money in the fall of 2012. If there’s one clear winner, it’s “Big Data”: three of the grants focus on building new...
Feb, 19, 2013
Disentangling the different types of skeptics and what modelers can learn from each.
What are the telltale signs of a modeling talk at a biology conference? Just look for the sighs, shifting, and eye-rolling in the audience, says Donald C. Bolser, PhD, professor of physiological...
Jun, 05, 2012
Using natural language processing to find necessary samples
To discover links between genes and disease, researchers typically recruit individual patients with and without the disease of interest; have them sign consent forms; take their medical histories;...
Jan, 01, 2010
Having developed detailed and sophisticated models of both E. Coli and human metabolism, researchers can begin to build toward a whole cell model that will be useful for the study of human health and disease.
If biologists really understood the functioning of the genome, they could in principle recreate it in silico. Instead of a choreographed swirl of molecules inside a living cell, electrons...
Oct, 01, 2008
Epistasis explored
When people work together, some individuals may hinder team performance—essentially masking the abilities of other members—while others may boost the group’s performance beyond the...
Sep, 01, 2011