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…
Natural products have an interesting story. The story of Taxol or Paclitaxel is interesting from its discovery as a natural product extracted from the bark tree to use as a cancer therapeutic. This compound came out of a screening effort in 1962 and it took until 2001 to become the highest selling cancer therapeutic. Now,…
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 many games that have been developed to enhance the understanding of biology and not many of them are good. However, when they work well – like this example from the Nobel prize foundation that is illustrated below – they illustrate the concept well. One wonders how many of these games illustrate all…
FDA just accepted an IND from Voyageur therapeutics for Parkinson’s disease. This trial essentially adds a gene for an enzyme that Aromatic L Amino acid Decarboxylase (AADC) that catalyzes the conversion of levodopa to dopamine. This is added to the putamen (brain) and adds the adeno associated virus that would carry the gene. It is…
Medicinal chemists have been using fluorine as a Hydrogen substitute in drug discovery for a long time. It has been used in drug discovery to the extent that nearly 25% of the drugs today including some of the block busters have fluorine in them; like Prozac, Lipitor and Pervacid. Why do chemists use it? As…
There have been a variety of prizes to solve problems that are practical such as space rocket. Some companies have made a business out of problem solving through mediating solvers and problem generators – such as those mediated by Innocentive. However, rarely are problems solved just for the sake of solution of the problem. One…
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…
RockHealth puts out a report that lists companies that received funding and there are several interesting points in that report for 2017. In their list of megadeals – those companies that received more than $100M in funding, it is interesting that the companies are distributed throughout and not just the two coasts. One of the…
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