Author: Peter St.Wecker

Biohackers

/ Peter St.Wecker / 1 Comment

Credit: Penguin Books

When we think of Translational Science, we imagine going from bench to bedside to community.  But what if the research itself is happening in the community?  Meet the Biohackers:

These do-it-yourself biology hobbyists want to bring biotechnology out of institutional labs and into our homes. Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer in Jobs’s garage, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who invented Google in a friend’s garage, biohackers are attempting bold feats of genetic engineering, drug development, and biotech research in makeshift home laboratories.

In Biopunk, journalist Marcus Wohlsen surveys the rising tide of the biohacker movement, which has been made possible by a convergence of better and cheaper technologies. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can send some spit to a sequencing company and receive a complete DNA scan, and then use free software to analyze the results. Custom-made DNA can be mail-ordered off websites, and affordable biotech gear is available on Craigslist and eBay.

Is there a place for this movement in the CTSI continuum?

So Close…

/ Peter St.Wecker

With all of the interesting scientific conferences going on around the world, it’s exciting to hear of one taking place in your own backyard.  Unfortunately, it’s less exciting when this knowledge comes a few days too late.  As I learned yesterday:

The second Sage Bionetworks Commons Congress will be held in San Francisco on April 15-16, 2011.  The theme will be the move towards personalized, patient-driven medicine, and the role that Sage Bionetworks can play in that transition. Expect reports from the Sage Federation, Working Groups, and exciting projects like SageCite, poster sessions and evening activities.

The conference venue? The Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF.  However, the good news is that all of the presentations, including videos, are now available online.

Interactive Biomedical Data Visualization

/ Peter St.Wecker

TripleMap

Continuing our theme of visualization, it looks like some pretty interesting tools are continuing to be developed.  One example is called TripleMap:

TripleMap is a data-driven software framework which gives biomedical research scientists access to massive interconnected networks of life science data. Using TripleMap you can analyze, visualize and share this information by creating “maps” of associated data which are relevant to your research.

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Using a proprietary algorithm called Inferential Connectivity Analysis (ICA), TripleMap can identify connections for you between any two entities in its network. Want to know about potential connections between a protein and a disease? Want to know about potential connections between a compound and a cellular pathway? With ICA, TripleMap can perform a comprehensive, “deep” traversal of the entire TripleMap data network and identify any connecting entities. How powerful is identification of novel connections? It can be the difference between success and failure, novel insight and (less than) blissful ignorance.

Although they’re still in a closed “alpha” mode, the developer told me that they will be integrating the MedDRA ontology into it over the weekend, and he’ll send me a trial code early next week.  I’ll post a follow-up after I give it a try.