Discover the Science of Health
LowestMed recently launched a first-in-the-industry mobile app that enables healthcare consumers to view and compare prescription drug prices — including $4 generic drugs — at leading supermarket and pharmacy chains in their local area on an iPhone or Android device.
Biomarker Bulletin is an occasionally recurring update of news focused on biomarkers aggregated at BiomarkerCommons.org. Biomarkers are physical, functional or biochemical indicators of normal physiological or disease processes. The individualization of disease management — personalized medicine — is dependent on developing biomarkers that promote specific clinical domains, including early detection, risk, diagnosis, prognosis and predicted response to therapy.
Selventa, a biomarker discovery company that enables personalized healthcare through the stratification of patients based on disease-driving mechanisms, recently announced a US patent that relates methods and techniques that facilitate discovery of biomarkers, thus aiding in the development of predictive and prognostic diagnostic tests for therapeutics targeting complex multi-factorial diseases.
Increasing emphasis is being placed on biomarker discovery as the key to advancing personalized medicine.
Critical Diagnostics is a U.S.-based biomarker company focused on optimizing patient care in cardiovascular diseases, such as heart failure.
The success of personalized cancer therapeutics relies on the development of companion diagnostic assays that can identify the most appropriate cancer patient, tumor type and disease state. To address this need, SciClips, a Wisconsin-based open innovation platform company that enables scientists and researchers to collaborate and share research and ideas, recently launched a cancer (oncology) biomarker database.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is currently seeking letters of inquiry for the grant program Biomarkers of Gastrointestinal (Gut) Function and Health.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston are working on a robotic endoscope. The size of a large pill, the magnetic microswimmer is powered by strong magnetic fields generated by an MRI machine.
The technology was recently published in the journal Biomedical Microdevices. A 20mm long, 5mm wide swimming tail made of copper and flexible polymer vibrates due to the magnets in the MRI machine and propels the capsule endoscope in the stomach. Propulsion speed is on the order of several millimeter per second.
What makes this endoscope truly different from current “capsule endoscopies,” which involves swallowing a pill-sized camera that takes pictures continuously until it is passed, is that electronics and microsensors embedded in the robotic endoscope will allow an operator to manipulate the magnetic field and guide the movement of — literally steer — the device through the GI tract.
In the future, the microswimmer may allow doctors to find difficult-to-diagnose, early stage cancer or allow for treatments such as biopsies or local drug delivery.
Ever since the human genome was sequenced in 2000, there’s been talk of a “$1,000 genome” — the ability to map an individual’s complete genome for one thousand U.S. dollars.
Life Technologies announced yesterday that it has achieved that milestone with the release of the new benchtop Ion Proton Sequencer, which is designed to sequence the entire human genome in a single day (existing DNA sequencing technologies take a week or longer) for $1,000 USD.
Novartis said on Sunday that it is voluntarily recalling certain lots of over-the-counter products because they might contain broken or stray tablets from other products [1]. The recall comes following consumer complaints of chipped and broken pills, and inconsistent bottle packaging line clearance practices (meaning cleaning and clearance operations that are performed when a product or strength change occurs during medicine packaging) that may have possibly resulted in mixed tablets.
