Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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New way to sense chemicals in body fluids
Sensing chemicals or metabolites in human body is difficult and new technologies are requiredSeveral sensors exist for measuring specific compounds in body fluids in vitro and in vivo. The common ones to sense glucose and lactate use and enzyme that is coupled to some electronic moiety that then generates a signal. This signal is then…
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Image analysis – outsourced, simple and free
Image analysis used to be very labor-intensive operation. It required programmers to understand what was being analyzed and then developing algorithms to specifically find the areas of interest. Then came Machine learning and Artificial intelligence tools. These found and analyzed the data but now you needed different set of programmers and they needed more sample…
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Not design
When you design for a specific action or purpose, a significant plan and thought goes into coming up with a piece of software or instrument or device. This works well for most products. But sometimes for prototypes, or to prove a concept, some really creative people can adapt a concept that did not exist before…
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Patenting natural products – Jokichi Takamine
Patents are important to give companies exclusivity in the business of biotechnology. In the patent court a “natural product” is not considered patentable since it is the act of nature and not necessarily an invention. However, one Japanese man – Jokichi Takamine, the first pioneer in Biotechnology nearly 120 years ago, patented a natural product…
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Separating signal from the noise
Most analysis whether they are analyzing data from a clinical trial or whether they are trying to analyze images. Similarly, analysis of data requires separation of noise from the signal. In imaging one of the newer techniques of segmenting images is called Multicut. This is best explained in an article that was written for the…
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Information flow is important
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…
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Natural products in a Yew tree
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,…
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Filtering bacteria
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…
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Biology games
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…
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Adeno associated virus in patients
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…
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