Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Innovation in pharmaceutical companies
Bob Langer at MIT is a recognized inventor with nearly 811 patents and with more than 25 companies started. He has come up with so many ideas and is so creative that it is amazing to compare him with Thomas Edison who had nearly ~1000 US patents. Interestingly, he has made some interesting on how…
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Mechanism of action of drugs
As more drugs are discovered, it is often assumed that we understand the logical mechanisms of how drug acts on specific physiology and in terms of bacteria and virus, how that drug inhibits the growth or survival of the microbe. However, in many cases the mechanism of action is understood much later. In the early…
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Visualize large data sets
It is very difficult to analyze large data sets using statistical methods if the variation in data is high. The statistical method requires large samples to average out the noise. Even then to spot a pattern takes an enormous amount of time. However, sometimes the right visualization helps one understand the data very easily rather…
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Bayes Theorem
How do we make sense of all the data that is being generated? Traditional statistics seems to fail to analyze such huge numbers and permutations and some mathematicians have suggested that Bayesian methods might be the answer. Search for an explanation of Bayes Theorem or Bayes Statistics and you will find countless documents. One search…
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Statistical approaches
Scientists frequently use statistics to determine the validity of their results. Usually a statistician gets involved and then there are statistic tests that are run to test the hypothesis. Most frequently these statistics tests are run with one specific goal. Test to determine whether these observed phenomenon are just random events i.e. signal vs. noise.…
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Big Data survey: important but needs support
Interesting survey out by CIO Magazine that comments that Big Data aka Analysis of large data sets is important to many people surveyed. The survey indicated that the number one issue to big data analysis is budgets. But, isn’t that true for most projects? However there were several other insights. The big need for all…
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Simple is better
It is interesting how we researchers sometimes do plenty of research to find out what we know already. We sometimes like to complicate things too much. In the September 2012 issue of Nature Methods, two researchers, Nils Gehlenborg and Bang Wong commented that three dimensional visualization is only good for spatial data and not much…
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Big online databases – Drug Bank
Drug Bank is a great database if you are at a pharmaceutical or Biotech company. This database has enormous drug information about all the FDA approved drugs and some others. Each entry contains more than 150 items including chemical, structure, pharmacological and more importantly, drug target information. This data is also available to download and…
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Big online databases – OMIM
Big data analysis has become the new buzzword. It is incredible to see how much data is available in online databases these days. There are many databases for the scientist – for example PubMed is the one that is used most prominently by researchers to look up a reference. However, there are many that are…
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FDA Unique device identification rule
FDA has been working to release a rule that will require that each medical device be uniquely identified by an identification number and bar code. This will enable each device to be targeted in case there are any issues at a later point. This requires that as the medical devices are made, they need to…
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