The age of gene editing is upon us. Specifically, the use of CRISPR. Amazing things are happening, proving again how clever humans are. Whether we're smart remains to be seen. For those who are unfamiliar with it, CRISPR -- more accurately, CRISPR-Cas 9 -- is a new technique for gene editing. It has allowed faster, more precise, and less expensive gene editing. It can already do more than you may realize. CRISPR has been much in the news lately, due to a new study published in Nature. Researchers successfully corrected a DNA mutation that causes a common heart disease that is sometimes fatal, especially for young athletes. In what is believed to be a first, the researchers repaired viable embryos. Moreover, they repaired most (72%) of the embryos, which is much better than previous efforts...
breast cancer
See the following -
Artificial Intelligence Achieves Near-Human Performance in Diagnosing Breast Cancer
Human and computer analyses together identify cancer with 99.5% accuracy. Pathologists have been largely diagnosing disease the same way for the past 100 years, by manually reviewing images under a microscope. But new work suggests that computers can help doctors improve accuracy and significantly change the way cancer and other diseases are diagnosed. A research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) methods aimed at training computers to interpret pathology images, with the long-term goal of building AI-powered systems to make pathologic diagnoses more accurate...
- Login to post comments
Atrazine: Syngenta's Herbicide Doesn't Just Poison Frogs - It Could Give You Cancer
Tyrone Hayes has fought a 15-year battle with Syngenta following his discovery that its herbicide Atrazine scrambles sex in frogs, writes F William Engdahl. Now he wants to know - is Atrazine the cause of the US's 2-fold reproductive cancer excess among Blacks and Hispanics?...
- Login to post comments
Battle Against Breast Cancer Goes Open Source
After a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision shielded Myriad Genetics' genetic data on breast cancer from disclosure, the nonprofit coalition Free the Data! launched a campaign to open troves of molecular information about widespread tumors with the help of big data software outfit Syapse. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Biden Announces Major Open Initiatives At Cancer Moonshot Summit
Today, the Cancer Moonshot is hosting a summit at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. as part of a national day of action that also includes more than 270 events in communities across the United States. Vice President Joe Biden will join over 350 researchers, oncologists and other care providers, data and technology experts, patients, families, and patient advocates, among others, will come together at Howard University. They will be joined by more than 6,000 individuals at events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam. This is the first time a group this expansive and diverse will meet under a government charge is to double the rate of progress in our understanding, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care of cancer...
- Login to post comments
CDISC and TransCelerate Announce New Standard for Breast Cancer to Support Data Sharing for Oncology Research
The need to rapidly and efficiently share new data in cancer research was recently, and powerfully, highlighted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and TransCelerate BioPharma, Inc. (“TransCelerate”) announce today the open availability of a new CDISC Therapeutic Area (TA) Standard for Breast Cancer. The CDISC global TA standards can streamline the way clinical research is conducted so that data can be readily shared among clinicians, researchers and regulators around the world, thus leading to more rapid and “smarter” research...
- Login to post comments
Halamka Says We Can and Must Improve Healthcare Management
As a physician and CIO, I’m quick to spot inefficiencies in healthcare workflow. More importantly, as the care navigator for my family, I have extensive firsthand experience with patient facing processes. My wife’s cancer treatment, my father’s end of life care, and my own recent primary hypertension diagnosis taught me how we can do better. Last week, when my wife received a rejection in coverage letter from Harvard Pilgrim/Caremark, it highlighted the imperative we have to improve care management workflow in the US. Since completing her estrogen positive, progesterone positive, HER2 negative breast cancer treatment in 2012 (chemotherapy, surgery, radiation), she’s been maintained on depot lupron and tamoxifen to suppress estrogen...
- Login to post comments
How Big Data Is Taking On Breast Cancer — And Big Biotech
Now that the Supreme Court has decided that human genes can’t be patented, a group of researchers is using high-tech data science to better understand the genetic mutations associated with breast cancer. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Penn Medicine Launches First Apple ResearchKit App for Sarcoidosis Patients
Penn Medicine today launched its first Apple ResearchKit app, focused on patients with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition that can affect the lungs, skin, eyes, heart, brain, and other organs. The effort marks Penn’s first time using modules from Apple’s ResearchKit framework, as part of the institution’s focus on mobile health and innovative research strategies. ResearchKit is an open source software framework designed specifically for medical research that helps doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using an iPhone...
- Login to post comments
Scientists Develop ‘Lab on a Chip’ That Costs 1 Cent to Make
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a way to produce a cheap and reusable diagnostic “lab on a chip” with the help of an ordinary inkjet printer. At a production cost of as little as 1 cent per chip, the new technology could usher in a medical diagnostics revolution like the kind brought on by low-cost genome sequencing, said Ron Davis, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center...
- Login to post comments
Team Taps The Wisdom Of The Crowd To Impact Breast Cancer Prognosis
Two new reports issuing in Science Translational Medicine (STM) today showcase the potential of teams of scientists working together to solve increasingly complex medical problems. The results demonstrate that better predictors of breast cancer progression than those currently available can be rapidly evolved by running open Big Data Challenges [...]. Read More »
- Login to post comments
The First 3D Printed Organ -- A Liver -- Is Expected In 2014
Approximately 18 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. But that may change someday sooner than you think -- thanks to 3D printing. Read More »
- Login to post comments
The Golden Spike Part 2
Today we made history in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At 11:35am Governor Deval and his physician sent the Governor's healthcare record from Massachusetts General Hospital to Baystate Medical Center. It arrived and was integrated into Baystate's Cerner medical record. Read More »
- Login to post comments
The Link Between Birth-Control Pills And Breast Cancer
A new study finds that pills with a high level of estrogen increase breast-cancer risk significantly. But that still might not mean you should change your prescription...
- Login to post comments
The Pandora's Box of Gene Editing Is Now Open
- Login to post comments
The Third-Leading Cause Of Death Is Preventable, But Candidates Don't Mention It
It is more likely to kill you than terrorism. It has profoundly impacted virtually every American family. So this election year, why aren’t politicians at all levels of government talking about the third-leading cause of death in America—preventable errors in healthcare? The statistics are staggering: more than 500 patients per day are killed by errors, accidents and infections in hospitals alone. Medical errors kill more people annually than breast cancer, AIDS or drug overdoses...
- Login to post comments