biomedical research

See the following -

Government as a Platform for Progress: HHS’s Open Government Plan

Mary K. Wakefield, Ph.D., RN | HHS Blog | October 6, 2016

One of the first actions President Obama took after taking office was to direct federal agencies to find new ways to increase transparency, collaboration and public engagement. Since then, one of our top priorities at HHS has been to make our Department more open and accountable to the people we serve. With the publication of our fourth HHS Open Government Plan, we’re building on our past performance in making government more transparent to the public and engaging in new ways of collaborating and partnering with our stakeholders.

Read More »

How Flawed Science Is Undermining Good Medicine

David Greene | NPR | April 6, 2017

A surprising medical finding caught the eye of NPR's veteran science correspondent Richard Harris in 2014. A scientist from the drug company Amgen had reviewed the results of 53 studies that were originally thought to be highly promising — findings likely to lead to important new drugs. But when the Amgen scientist tried to replicate those promising results, in most cases he couldn't...

Read More »

How Secrecy in Medical Research Harms our Health

David Hammerstein | David Hammerstein's Blog | June 29, 2012

Medical research data remain shrouded in secrecy.  As a result the data is distorted and misrepresented by pharmaceutical companies launching new medicines to exaggerate their efficacy, minimize their harmful side effects, and conceal the fact that these products are often no more effective than those already on the market.  Clinical trials are unnecessarily repeated and overall, health-care and patients suffer. Read More »

How the Shutdown Is Devastating Biomedical Scientists And Killing Their Research

Brandon Keim | Wired | October 3, 2013

The federal shutdown’s effects on science and medicine are many. There’s halted food safety inspections, kids with cancer who won’t be able to join clinical drug trials, and suspension of disease outbreak monitoring. Conservation studies have been thrown into disarray and at least one NASA Mars mission is at risk of being delayed for years. Read More »

i2b2 Open Source Software Boosts HIE, Biomedical Research

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | November 16, 2012

The health informatics software i2b2 — Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside — was started in 2006, and has become something of a building block for several health information networks and research projects in genomics, pharmaceuticals and population health. Read More »

IBM And University Scientists Launch Global Computing Effort To Find Cures For Dengue, West Nile, And Hepatitis C Diseases

Press Release | International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) | August 23, 2007

Researchers Say the 50,000 Years of Computer Time Needed to Discover Cures May Be Achieved in One Year Using World Community Grid Read More »

Limited Funding Hinders Charity Support Of Open Access Publishing

Staff Writer | The Information Daily | October 24, 2013

Charities’ need to justify expenditure to donors is preventing them from practising open access publishing despite supporting its aims, say new study in BMJ Open. Read More »

Next Wave of Entrepreneurs Arrives at HHS to Help Tackle Major Healthcare Challenges

Press Release | US Department and Health and Human Services (HHS) | November 13, 2014

Today, Bryan Sivak, U.S. Department and Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer, announced the newest cohort of HHS Entrepreneurs-in-Residence. Part of the Secretary’s Initiatives to better serve the American people, the HHS Entrepreneurs-in-Residence program matches HHS employees with external expertise to work on a high risk high reward projects over a 13-month period.

Read More »

NIH Bets Big Bucks On Big Data

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | July 23, 2013

The National Institutes of Health plans to invest up to $96 million over four years to put big data to work solving persistent health riddles, the agency said Monday. Read More »

NIH Big Data Effort Focuses On Better Knowledge From Existing Data

Susan D.Hall | Fierce Health IT | May 12, 2014

Big data is transforming biomedical research, National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins writes in a blog post announcing an initiative called Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K).  To illustrate his point, Collins points to the work of Atul Butte of Stanford University, a NIH-funded researcher looking among mountains of existing data to find new links among genes, diseases and traits.

Read More »

NIH Offers Data Science $96 Million

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | July 24, 2013

The National Institutes of Health is going to fund several new Big Data to Knowledge Centers of Excellence, from a budget of $96 million over the next four years. Read More »

NIH To Appoint Chief Data Official

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | January 10, 2013

The National Institutes of Health plans to recruit a new associate director to examine the potential for vast new troves of biomedical research data related to genomics, imaging, and electronic health records, the institute said Thursday. Read More »

NIH to Bring Precision Medicine Data Collection to Patient Homes

Jennifer Bresnick | HealthIT Analytics | April 6, 2017

Thousands of volunteers for the All of Us precision medicine cohort won’t even have to leave the comfort of their living rooms when contributing data to the project thanks to a new NIH collaboration with mobile medical service EMSI. The All of Us program, formally known as the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort, aims to collect biosamples from at least one million patients to fuel big data analytics and personalized medicine research...

Read More »

NIH-built Toolset Helps Researchers Share and Compare Data

Paul McCloskey | GCN | October 10, 2015

On battlefields across the Middle East and football fields in the United States, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has hit near-epidemic proportions in the past several years. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it leads to 52,000 deaths and 275,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. each year. The spiraling caseload is pushing biomedical researchers to stretch their increasingly tight budgets and maximize their research to help prevent TBI and other serious health threats. Read More »

NIST Issues Call For Developing -- And Using -- Consensus Standards To Ensure The Quality Of Cell Lines

Press Release | National Institute Of Standards And Technology (NIST) | June 14, 2016

Mainstays of biomedical research, permanent lines of cloned cells are used to study the biology of health and disease and to test prospective medical therapies. Yet, all too often, these apparent pillars of bioscience and biotechnology crumble because they are crafted from faulty starting materials: misidentified or cross-contaminated cell lines. Writing in the June 2016 issue of PLOS Biology, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) call for "community action" to assemble a "comprehensive toolkit for assuring the quality of cell lines," employed at the start of every study.