Things I noticed #13

A thoroughly enjoyable weekend spent at Mindcamp 3.0 brings another week to an end. The coming week is going to see the next step in the evolution of this blog. With luck, I am going to be moving the blog to a new host. After that I plan to begin the construction of my web empire in earnest. Just kidding, but I do have multiple interests and it would be good to build a good portal into that world. Hopefully the transfer will be smooth and any downtime barely noticeable. I will probably make the jump sometime over the next few days. With all that, what did I notice this week?

Pipelining, workflows and grids

My favorite data pipelining company has signed a deal with Altair Engineering. As a member of Scitegic’s ISV program Altair can now add something that Pipeline Pilot has been sorely missing, at least in a formal sense, a distributed computing capability

Tufts on biotech

The latest report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development focuses on biotech drugs. According to this study, the cost for a biotech drug is ~$1.2 billion. The Tufts impact reports are taken quite seriously by industry watchers, e.g. the figure often reported for the development of a new chemical entity is taken from a previous Tufts report. The part that jumped out at me was that it takes 8% longer to develop biotech derived drugs. I wonder what the primary bottlenecks are?

The HHS and Personalized Healthcare

The Healthcare IT Guy points to an RFI from HHS for personalized healthcare. He also announces the start of the HIMSS blog

Tracking memes in science

Postgenomic has taken the next step towards becoming the techmeme of the scientific world. The scientific blogosphere is still too fragmented and small for a memetracker to have the kind of impact that techmeme has, but the day will come when we will all be turning to postgenomic to get our daily fill of scientific news.

Googling diagnoses

Via postgenomic, I found this blog post that talks about a BMJ paper that suggests that using google had a 58% success rate when the diagnosis was not known. The study raises a more important question (and this came up at Mindcamp too). When, where and how can search help the medical community. Of course, that is a frequent topic in this space, so I will not go further, but it’s interesting food for thought.

It’s not just the biologists

Chemists are beginning to wonder about open publishing. Peter Murray-Rust is of course, one of the premier supporters of open data standards in the chemistry world, so to see this on his blog is not a susprise. The American Chemical Society, e.g., till very recently required a user to register to see abstracts (that has changed). It would be a good start for the ACS to start working with organizations like Nature on publishing standards.

Technorati Tags: Scitegic, Open Publishing, Tufts Impact Report, Healthcare Informatics, Chemistry