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.
With warmer days ahead, children will start flocking to the outdoors for fresh air and sunshine. However, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics, only 25% of them will be appropriately shielded from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays [1]. This is down from 50% of children who reported using sunscreen “often or always” in 2004.
Image credit: Skin care on the back via ShutterstockIt seems to be a fact of life that memory performance decreases as we age, but new research helps to understand what precisely is decreasing, why and points towards strategies that might help. A study published in the journal Memory suggests that older adults perform less well on working memory tasks as they do not forget information that is no longer relevant [1]. This might sound like a good thing, but it leads to overload of memory processes, damaging memory performance.
Images in the mind image via ShutterstockIn a move to re-engineer the process of translating scientific discoveries into new drugs, diagnostics, and devices, the National Institutes of Health has established the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The action was made possible by Congress’ approval of a fiscal year 2012 spending bill and the president’s signing of the bill, which includes the establishment of NCATS with a budget of $575 million.
