Harvard project compares medical files with genetics

A new project designed at Harvard takes computers, using artificial intelligence, to scan the private medical files of 2.5 million people at local hospitals, as part of a NIH-funded effort to find the genetic roots of diseases.

The story is reported today in the The Boston Globe by reporter Gareth Cook, so check it out.

The Globe story says that the $20 million project would probe more deeply and more quickly into medical records than human researchers are capable of, and is designed to find links between patients’ DNA and illnesses.

"Although the effort could raise concerns about privacy, researchers say the new program, called ”I2B2" (for Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) would respect the strict guidelines set out in federal and state laws, and could be a powerful tool for many kinds of research," Cook reports in the Globe.

The NIH grant selected Boston for this effort and plans to make this new software available for free to US hospitals.

You can find a lengthy story with alot more interesting detail at The Boston Globe

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Nanoparticles carry cancer-killing drugs into tumor cells

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that one of the first practical and profitable uses for nanotechnology will be making delivery vehicles for chemotherapeutic agents. No, not itsy-bitsy submarines, but molecules that are designed to have an affinity for cancer cells. The idea is get more chemo to cancer cells and less to normal cells. From Eureka Alert:

"This is the first study to demonstrate a nanoparticle-targeted drug
actually leaving the bloodstream, being concentrated in cancer cells,
and having a biological effect on the animal’s tumor," says James R.
Baker Jr., M.D., the Ruth Dow Doan Professor of Biologic Nanotechnology
at the University of Michigan, who directed the study.

"We’re very optimistic that nanotechnology can markedly improve cancer
therapy," says Baker, who directs the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute
for Medicine and the Biological Sciences. "Targeting drugs directly to
cancer cells reduces the amount that gets to normal cells, increases
the drug’s anti-cancer effect and reduces its toxicity. By improving
the therapeutic index of cancer drugs, we hope to turn cancer into a
chronic, manageable disease."

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NIH starts "Roadmap" to study small molecules

Around the American Cancer Society we talk alot about screening – cancer screening. The ACS believes that early detection exams and tests can help save lives and reduce suffering from many cancers. The ACS also supports the idea of advancing innovative, high-impact research, and thus the following story is of interest.

The news today is about a type of screening that the National Intitutes of Health just funded this week, and also very important in preventing disease.

According to an NIH press statement, it is awarding $88.9 million in grants to nine institutions over three years to establish a collaborative research network that will use high-tech screening methods to identify small molecules that can be used as research tools. Small molecules have great potential to help scientists in their efforts to learn more about key biological processes involved in human health and disease.

"This tremendous collaborative effort will accelerate our understanding of biology and disease mechanisms," says Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, NIH Director, in the statement. "More importantly, it will, for the first time, enable academic researchers to explore novel ideas and enable progress on a broad front against human disease."

Called “Roadmap” Grants," the broad-based screening effort will eventually enable researchers to explore the hundreds of thousands of proteins believed to be encoded by the approximately 25,000 genes in the human genome. At this time only a few hundred human proteins have been studied in detail using small molecule probes.

And, states the NIH, the Roadmap’s "New Pathways to Discovery" initiative has set out to advance the understanding of biological systems and build a better "toolbox" for medical researchers in the 21st century.

"This collaborative screening effort will enable academic and government researchers to contribute in a much more vigorous way to an understanding of the mechanisms of disease, and even to the identification of potential targets for new therapies. Central to this effort are the databases supporting the network, which will allow us to tie together data from diverse fields of science in ways not previously brought to bear on important health problems," says Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

You can find more information about this at the NIH web site.

This is exciting news in support of medical innovation! The future is looking bright for discovery and what these advances will bring.

Promises to keep

Going to be an interesting day. I’m attending a conference at Stanford U entitled "Realizing the Promise: Early Detection of Cancer."  Pat Felts, Dr. Georjean Stoodt, and Dr. Cynthia LeBlanc and a cadre of California Division and NHO staff are here as well. The spark-plug for the conference is Dr. Lee Hartwell, ACS Professor, Medal of Honor winner and Nobel Laureate.

The conference is put on by the Canary Fund (think, canaries…coal mines…early detection). Gonna be about the latest technology and science for earliest possible detection. Such toothsome topics today as: transcriptomics, DNA markers, proteomics, epigenomics, molecular imaging. Yum.