December 2009/January 2010
By Jeanene Swanson
Just how the cytosolic protein retinoic acid inducible-gene I detects viral RNA and elicits an antiviral immune response isn’t known. Solving the mystery of how it goes about its business is a big focus of Su-A Myong’s lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. One of the strongest investigative tools she has is single molecule fluorescence detection. Following up on work from Japanese scientists, who in 2004 discovered the antiviral receptor function of RIG-I, an RNA helicase that can detect replicating double-stranded RNA viruses and subsequently activate immune signaling pathways in the host cell, Myong developed a technique to observe the activity of this protein at the single molecule level.
CTSciNet
By Brian Vastag January 22, 2010
The field of clinical research informatics–the art and science of improving information flow during clinical studies–is exploding, driving demand for those so skilled. It’s an area that is “just solidifying as a field, and there’s a lot of work out there,” says Peter Embi of the University of Cincinnati Center for Health Informatics, in CTSciNet, the clinical and translational science network.
Improving information flow during trials, creating software to alert intake coordinators when eligible patients are recorded in a hospital data warehouse, and designing systems that move patient data from bedside monitors into research databases are some of the assignments being tackled by clinical informatics specialists.
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Posted December 4, 2009
Jagsi R. Ann Intern Med. 2009;151:804-811.
Women researchers who are awarded competitive early career National Institutes of Health awards are less likely than their male counterparts to go on to receive major funding awards.
Researchers conducted a study of 2,783 researchers who had received highly competitive early career awards called K08 and K23. These awards provide funding that protects researcher’s time and include a mentoring component to help nurture a young clinician-scientist’s career.
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Life Science Leader, January 2010
Cliff Mintz Ph.D.
Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is one of only a handful of biotechnology companies that was built almost exclusively on a genomics and bioinformatics technology platform. Despite modest beginnings in 1993, the company has transformed itself from a fledgling genomics startup into a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company. Its flagship product is VELCADE (bortezomib) for Injection, an FDA-approved treatment for multiple myeloma and relapsed mantle cell lymphoma. In May 2008, the company was acquired by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company, and currently operates as an independent subsidiary known as Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.
One of the scientists and executives who helped transform Millennium into a world-class oncology company is Nancy Simonian, M.D. Dr. Simonian is currently Millennium’s chief medical officer and has responsibility for the company’s clinical development programs, pharmacovigilance, regulatory affairs, and development project management.
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Life Science Leader, January 2010
Suzanne Elvidge
Women make up approximately half of the world’s population, but have traditionally supplied a smaller proportion of the workforce. This has been changing over the years, and by October 2009, there was a breakthrough in women’s employment — according to a report by the Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver, women made up half of the U.S. workforce for the first time in history.
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January 14, 2010
Genomeweb
The Daily Scan
“Bottom line: we’re not imagining declines on every front,” says Writedit at Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association examines the state of biomedical research funding in the US. The researchers say that, with adjustments for inflation, funding between 2003 and 2007 had a compound annual growth rate of 3.4 percent while 1994 to 2003 increased at an annual rate of 7.8 percent. Writedit points out that there is also a decline in industry-supported academic research, and an accompanying editorial in JAMA notes that other sources indicate a decline in that funding as well. The data “make a strong case for more consistent, coordinated, data-driven, and sustainable decisions regarding biomedical research funding,” writes Thomas Boat in the editorial.
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January 13, 2010
Genomeweb
The Daily Scan
Discover magazine released its top 100 stories of 2009, on which the Myriad Genetics gene patenting case comes in at #52. Other stories of interest: a retrovirus that hits the human genome and may cause chronic fatigue syndrome; inserting the human FOXP2 gene into mice; and Reza Ghadiri’s work with tPNA and its implications in RNA studies.
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By DEEPAK SINGH | Published: DECEMBER 28, 2009
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have an updated MapReduce paper (doi) in the Communications of the ACM. The paper is a pretty strong rebuttal to some claims by Mike Stonebraker and others on the value of the MapReduce model. I am going to let you read the paper (as well as the original papers). What I wanted to talk about were some of the key aspects of the MapReduce model and how this way of thinking is relevant to the life sciences.
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Outsourcing-Pharma.com
Randomised clinical trials have been the mainstay of pharmaceutical product development for decades, but will they be designed and carried out the same way in future? With trials tipped to get smaller and patient selection more complex as pharma’s blockbuster model is dismantled, interactive technologies, adaptive designs and new ways to recruit and monitor patients will come to the fore.
Hear more about adaptive methods…
January 15, 2010
By a GenomeWeb staff reporter
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health on Friday issued requests for applications for two trans-NIH funding programs for small businesses focused on bioscience and biomedicine, including the Small Business Innovation Research grants and the Small Business Technology Transfer program.
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