Biomarker

We had an interesting discussion with Dr Rebecca Fitzgerald, MD who is a Professor of Cancer Prevention at the University of Cambridge. Dr Fitzgeralds work aims to improve methods for early cancer detection for esophageal cancer through better understanding of the methods of molecular pathogenesis.She has developed many methods to quantify biomarkers in Barrett’s syndrome….

Often times, it is difficult to understand the role of a biomarker in a disease process. The signaling and biochemical networks within the cell are complex but when paired with other networks between cells and in a whole organism, the complexity goes up by significant dimensions.To understand networks, there are various institutes using the network…

Multi Drug resistance to bacteria is a problem since bacteria continue dividing in blood causing sepsis that cannot be controlled by antibiotics and ultimately causing death. There have been multiple methods that have been proposed. A unique method has been published in Nature that incorporates “filtering” blood to remove the bacteria.Blood flows very rapidly through…

There have been studies, that show that in a significant proportion of Autistic patients the symptoms of Autism decreases when the patients have a fever, or are treated with an antibiotic – vancomycin. This effect has been known since about 1980 and (also reported on the web at Simons foundation too). When a fever ran…

How does a hospital measure the acuity of an illness? Acuity is defined loosely as the severity of an illness. The more severe an illness or malady is the more attention it deserves. For example, chest pain is critical and deserves attention vs. flu like symptoms do not deserve as much attention. A doctor in…

Biomarker database There are several databases that are used to track biomarkers. The important thing to keep in mind is that the biomarker may be biological entity like a protein, lipid or DNA/RNA fragment but they can also be a group of cells – for example Tumor infiltrating cells or, physiological test, clinical outcome measure…

When you look up the drugs that fail due to lack efficacy in a Biotech company database such as this one, there are so many companies that fail because the drug was not efficacious – which means that it did not work as shown by the clinical trial. It is possible that the company is…