Geology, algos and breast cancer
January 31, 2006
Haven’t looked at this story in any sort of detail but it definitely sounds cool
Technorati Tags: Breast Cancer, Healthcare, Science, Algorithms
The future of medicine?
January 29, 2006
In the past I have discussed the demise of the blockbuster model and a focus on targeted therapies driven by systems biology and pharmacogenomics. Bio-IT World has an article on a pharmacogenomics drug in phase III trials. The depression drug vilazodone, by way of Clinical Data, combines the drug with a diagnostic test. This is just the beginning. The simultaneous development of biomarkers and a therapeutic drug is likely to become a popular route for certain diseases. Obviously there is no guarantee that the drug will pass trials (earlier versions failed), but it is a sign of the times. In a decade or so such approaches might even be the preferred route to therapy.
Technology Review also has an article on personalizing depression drugs which also talks about Roche’s diagnostic. To the best of my knowledge Roche is not co-marketing the diagnostic and the therapeutic, which would be a very good move on their part.
Additional Reading:
Computational biology and the impact on discovery
Dry pharma pipelines
2015 or 2025
Technorati Tags: Pharmacogenomics, Pharmaceuticals, Biomarkers, Healthcare
DNA-wrapped CNTs as sensors
January 27, 2006
Biosingularity has a post on recent work in Science by scientists at the University of Illinois that shows how DNA-wrapped carbon nanotubes can be used as in vivo sensors. This is the kind of nanotechnology that, IMHO, should be the focus of government funding, as opposed to molecular manufacturing, which is likely to have a lesser impact in the near term (although, along with biological assembly, does have significant long term potential)
Biosingularity ยป DNA-wrapped carbon nanotubes serve as sensors in living cells
Technorati Tags: Nanotechnology, Nanobiology, Science
FPGAs???
January 25, 2006
There is an article on Bio-ITWorld.com that talks about key life science IT trends in 2006. Among those listed are field-programmable gate arrays (or FPGAs). They talk about efforts at Cray and SGI in this area. That does nothing to add to my skepticism of FGPAs gaining widespread use. In this day and age, neither company instills confidence, and I would argue that these are attempts from two former giants to gain a share in a very niche market. Multi-core processors, virtualization, 64-bit Linux (and windows), web services, and low-cost departmental supercomputing are going to be trends worth keeping an eye on. I also foresee an increased interest in on-demand computing and hosted services for specific tasks. However, no one seems to have taken the lead in this promising area.
Further Reading:
Biology and Computing
Science, communication and the new web
Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Bio-IT, Computing, Information Technology
Has bioinformatics stagnated?
January 22, 2006
The bioinformatics sector has gone through many ups and downs. While “pure” informatics companies are not quite as common as they used to be, information-based science is becoming an increasing part of the discovery process. However, over the years, I am not sure that the algorithms and methods that drive informatics have taken that next step. To some extent, we are still running many of the same algorithms and doing some of the same tasks we were doing at the turn of the century. Some of the more interesting advances have been made by companies like SciTegic and InforSense, which have created environments for data pipelining and application integration. It would be nice if the data and applications took the kind of leap that those suites provide to workflow development. I have no idea how good the technology from this company is, but it is one of the few times that I have seen a potentially exciting new approach to mining and integrating all the wonderful biological information out there. The word that caught my attention was “intelligence”, a word too often mis-used (and may be here as well), but much needed in the informatics sector.
Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science
