Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker and the USD $34 million Indian Government plan for Opensource Drug Development

Benjamin Franklin said “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” – Any one listening ! Leaders and veterans in Biotechnology and Health care research industry may not be welcoming [...]

Is bioinformatics still a viable career choice or a business model?

If you are on linkedin take a look at the question posted by Jake Chen, Founding Director at Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine. One area where bioinformatics havn’t experimented a lot is probably adopting SaaS (software as a service) methodology for growth. Software being developed for scientists is still not that user-friendly. [...]

Genetics Influence Blood Preassure medication

The study published in Jan. 23 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association  is a thumps up for those interested towards personalized medicine, a small but important step. A person’s genetic make-up seems to influence how he or she reacts to certain hypertension medications. The new study focused on the NPPA (atrial natriuretic [...]

The 1000 Genomes Project to Study Human Genetic Variation to Support Disease Studies

The 1000 Genomes Project, led by an international research consortium, will sequence the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The international research consortium draws support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the [...]

Missing Evolutionary Link -how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins

Alan Lambowitz, director of The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology and Senior researcher Paul Paukstelis and his team has found the missing links in evolution of life from the simple to the complex and involvement of RNA. By crystallizing a fungus the team of researchers were able to visualize [...]

Alternative for Smallpox vaccine

University of California, Irvine researchers  Philip Felgner and Huw Davies with the Department of Medicine found that the modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) produced the same antiviral response in human and animal studies as the current smallpox vaccine Dryvax. Smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980; the last naturally occurring case in the world was [...]

UK Government-backed sociology study using Genetics raises privacy concerns

The Uk government backed UK Household Longitudinal Study to use genetics analysis of British citizens (previous post on UK BioBank) to assess impact of Genetics and lifestyle in health and medical treatment and how it affects people’s social and economic status over time, is turning into controversy. The expansion of the program to cover “nature [...]

personalized, safety alerts about your medication

A service launched by quintiles claims to be one of the first to provide post launch drug safety information about drugs directly to any one who is using them.  iGuard is a web-based services that will help you take medication safety without the help of  healthcare professionals. You can register on the site for free [...]

Searching Through DNA – Impact of new genetics technologies in American Life

One of the reader had posted a question about my earlier post on genetics of Transplant Organ Rejection so this post is a part answer to her comment, I choose the title american way of life as my first post in 2008 is not mine but an interesting article from Newyork Times A good article [...]