Foundation Medicine is one of 10 biomedicine companies included in Technology Review’s 50 Most Innovative Companies (TR50) for 2012 [1].
Connect with Your Network to Improve Asthma Control
May 1, 2012 | by
World Asthma Day (WAD) takes place each year on the first Tuesday in May. The annual event, organized by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA), raises asthma awareness and care around the world. Continuing last year’s positive theme, the WAD 2012 theme is “You Can Control Your Asthma”. The campaign emphasizes asthma control as described in the latest version of the GINA guideline documents [1]. Asthma control is also the focus of GINA’s Asthma Control Challenge, a five-year campaign to reduce asthma hospitalizations worldwide by fifty percent.
App for Physicians Also Popular with Patients
April 30, 2012 | by
Epocrates is one of the most popular medical apps available for iPhones, iPads, Android, Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile. It’s intended to help physicians access medical information — including drug dosing, reference values for vital statistics, and information about diseases — quickly and efficiently. Because the app market is glutted with medical applications, the value of Epocrates is that it combines the most important functions into a single app. In a recent press release, the Epocrates compay referred to the app as a “prescription for medical app overload”:
Mobile apps are only as valuable as they are useful. We’ve advanced the user experience of our world-class drug reference app and added a singular channel to discover, store and access reliable tools. Furthermore, this is a fresh foundation for new partner engagements and opportunities to deliver even more value-add resources to our network.
Mad Cow Risk and Reasonable Precautions
April 30, 2012 | by
A case of so-called “mad cow disease” was found in a California dairy cow last week. The disease, known to veterinary scientists as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is fatal, and can be transmitted from cow-to-cow or cow-to-human through the ingestion of contaminated tissue. There is no evidence BSE spreads to humans — the human form of the disorder is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — through drinking milk. As such, authorities claim that the infected animal (which is being held and will be destroyed) posed no risk to humans.
To Lower Diabetes Risk, Get a Good Night’s Sleep
April 27, 2012 | by
We are all familiar with the negative consequences of getting too little sleep, but they may be more serious than just feeling a bit groggy. A new study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine has shown that sleep restriction, along with a disruption of one’s internal body clock, can raise the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes [1]. This could explain the increased rates of these conditions in shift workers and others who work at night.
