• ‘Heretical’ Idea for Treating Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Moves Forward

    Bio-IT World | The clinical utility of treating cancer by modulating the estrogen receptor could radically and quickly expand, initially for patients with triple-negative breast cancer but potentially thereafter to those with melanoma and cancers found in the colon, lung, head, and neck. Hope springs from findings emerging from the lab of Professor Donald McDonnell, Ph.D., at Duke University School of Medicine, where the field of oral selective estrogen down-regulators was pioneered nearly two decades ago.

    Oct 15, 2024

  • Building Digital Architecture to Reach New Heights: Data and Knowledge Management for Pharma 4.0

    Bio-IT World | In early 2024, it was revealed that contract research and manufacturing organization WuXi Apptec had allegedly shared intellectual property with the Chinese government without their client’s consent. This breach of trust generated widespread concern and backlash, bringing renewed attention to the importance of proper data management and data sharing in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

    Oct 11, 2024

  • New Tool Helps Query Databases, Flag Anomalies in Data

    Bio-IT World | In a data science paper published in June, a team of researchers at MIT presents GenSQL, a system to ease answering data science questions. They published the work in Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. GenSQL is available open source in Clojure on GitHub.

    Oct 8, 2024

  • New Techniques Make RNA Accessible to Study Variants of Uncertain Significance

    Bio-IT World | New work from Dr. Lachlan Jolly and the University of Adelaide’s Neurobiology Research Group is using cutting-edge RNA-based techniques to resolve genetic variants of uncertain significance (VUS) that can't be diagnosed through traditional methods. Many disease-causing genes do not express RNA in accessible tissues like blood or skin, leaving many patients without a clear diagnosis. To overcome this, the team is utilizing two innovative methods—transactivation and transdifferentiation.

    Oct 3, 2024