News Clips
Silicon Therapeutics Announces Recipient of the First Open Science Fellowship
Silicon Therapeutics, an integrated computational drug discovery company creating novel small molecule therapeutics for diseases with challenging protein targets, is pleased to announce that the first Open Science Fellowship will be awarded the laboratory of Dr. John D. Chodera at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). The fellowship is designed to advance the open science movement within the drug discovery industry, facilitating access to scientific knowledge, methods, and data. Patrick Grinaway, a graduate student in the Chodera Lab, will lead the development efforts of the project, entitled “Development of efficient open source free energy-based lead optimization algorithms"...
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Two Years In, What Has Apple ResearchKit Accomplished?
In March 2015, Apple promised to change the way medical research could be done. It launched ResearchKit, which could turn millions of iPhones around the world into a “powerful tool for medical research,” the company said at the time. Since then, ResearchKit — software that gives would-be app developers a library of coding to create health apps on the iPhone and Apple Watch — has spawned a number of studies: One team has used it to create an app to track Parkinson’s symptoms; another is trying out a screening protocol for autism. A third helps people inventory the moles on their skin and evaluate how they have changed over time...
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Open Access Genetic Screening for Hereditary Breast Cancer Is Feasible and Effective
Ashkenazi Jewish women are known to have a predisposition to the inherited breast cancers BRCA1 and BRCA2, but currently genetic testing in this group is limited to women affected by breast and ovarian cancers and those who are unaffected but have a family history of the disease. Ms Sari Lieberman, a genetic counsellor at the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, Jerusalem, Israel, will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics tomorrow (Sunday) that offering open-access BRCA testing to Ashkenazi women unaffected by cancer, regardless of their family history, enables the identification of carriers who would otherwise have been missed...
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Using Scientific Publications Strategy to Ensure a Pharmaceutical Company's Credibility and a Product's Viability
Scientific publications remain the principal way that biopharmaceutical organizations relay critical clinical trial data to key external stakeholders such as physicians and payers. Data from different phases of drug development are the earliest ways these stakeholders learn about new products and the information serves as the building blocks for how a new product will be positioned in the marketplace...
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Scientists Urged to Keep Rare Species Habitat Secret
Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) are calling for location data to be withheld from research publications to help protect some rare and endangered species. Lead researcher Professor David Lindenmayer from the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society said more than 20 newly-described species have been targeted by poachers. Professor Lindenmayer said in Australia people were trespassing on private property days after research was published online on the pink tail worm lizard....
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University of Oklahoma Researcher Asks Twitter Users to Help with Research
Did you ever consider that your tweets could be used for scientific research? Researchers at the University of Oklahoma are taking to the Twitterverse to help them investigate the use of Twitter for public health research. Christan Grant, a computer science researcher in the Gallogly College of Engineering, is asking active Twitter users over the age of 18 to complete a quick two-minute online survey...
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What U.S. Hospitals Can Still Learn from India’s Private Heart Hospitals
In 2008, we explored the emergence of private heart hospitals in India whose outcomes rivaled those of top U.S. hospitals (low infection and readmission rates for coronary artery bypass grafting [CABG], angioplasties, and other cutting-edge procedures) at between 1/10 and 1/20 of the cost. We described how Indian hospital leaders exhibited a near-obsessive drive to offer the highest quality services at the lowest possible price. We concluded that even though India is far from a model of social justice in health care, American hospitals could learn a great deal from the organizational focus and structure of their Indian counterparts...
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Cardiologist Eric Topol on Why We Need to Map the Human Body and “Go Deep” with Big Data
This year’s Big Data in Biomedicine conference included a passionate talk from cardiologist Eric Topol, MD, of The Scripps Research Institute. Topol, who has been named one of the most influential physician leaders in the United States, described in gripping detail what’s wrong with medical care today and why we need to move forward to the kind of individualized medicine that can make for healthier individuals and healthier populations...
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Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed with Your Photos
Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks. Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day. It’s on a growth trajectory to ascend to the vaunted billion-user club with essential products such as YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome. No one is quite sure what Google plans to do with all of these pictures in the long run, and it’s possible the company hasn’t even figured that out...
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i2b2 Foundation and tranSMART Foundation Merge to Become the i2b2 tranSMART Foundation
The tranSMART and i2b2 foundations today announce the completion of their merger to become the i2b2 tranSMART Foundation. The new organization is a global non-profit open-source foundation facilitating the further development of precision medicine and bringing it to practice. The mission of the i2b2 tranSMART Foundation is to enable effective collaboration for precision medicine through the sharing, integration, standardization, and analysis of heterogeneous data from healthcare and research; through engagement and mobilization of a life sciences focused open-source, open-data community...
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Q&A with Andy Oram: How Can We Tell Whether Predictive Analytics Are Biased?
The fear of reproducing society's prejudices through computer algorithms is being hotly discussed in both academic publications and the popular press. Just a few of the publications warning about bias in predictive analytics include the New York Times, the Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, and particularly a famous and hotly contested article by Propublica on predictions of recidivism among criminal defendants...
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Google, IBM, and Lyft Launch Open Source Project Istio
Google, IBM, and Lyft on Wednesday announced the first public release of Istio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms. According to the companies, Istio was created to address the inherent challenges that come with integrating application-based microservices in distributed systems, namely compliance and security...
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Google, IBM, and Lyft Launch Open Source Project Istio
Google, IBM, and Lyft on Wednesday announced the first public release of Istio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms. According to the companies, Istio was created to address the inherent challenges that come with integrating application-based microservices in distributed systems, namely compliance and security...
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Broad Institute to Release Genome Analysis Toolkit 4 (GATK4) as Open Source Resource to Accelerate Research
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will release version 4 of the industry-leading Genome Analysis Toolkit under an open source software license. The software package, designated GATK4, contains new tools and rebuilt architecture. It is available currently as an alpha preview on the Broad Institute's GATK website, with a beta release expected in mid-June. Broad engineers announced the upgrade, as well as the decision to release the tool as an open source product, at Bio-IT World today...
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IBM Accelerates Open Database-as-a-Service on IBM Power Systems
IBM today announced a new Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) toolkit on Power Systems optimized for open source databases, including MongoDB, EDB PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Neo4j, and Apache Cassandra to help deliver more speed, control, and efficiency for enterprise developers and IT departments. The new platform gives database administrators and developers the ability to easily deploy a fully configured private cloud with automated provisioning for open source database services...
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