kwiKBio Aims to Fast Track Research with Crowdsourcing Campaign

kwiKBio believes it’s taking too long to solve diseases and create cures. The company aims to combine advanced semantic web bioinformatics with contract research organization (CRO) business development in an e-commerce biomedical research portal. Think Wikipedia with an interactive research component coupled with Expedia for purchasing a ticket to a laboratory test.

kwikBio

Biomarker Bulletin: September 23, 2013

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.

Biomarker Commons

A Potential Blood Test for Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease

Researchers from Saarland University and Siemens Healthcare report that a new blood test can accurately discriminate between healthy people and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s hoped the non-invasive and relatively cheap test could one day help with diagnosis. The research is published in the open access journal Genome Biology [2].

Alzheimer's disease

Pluripotent Stem Cells and the Nobel Prize for Medicine

nobel medal in medicineThe 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced earlier this week. The prize was awarded to two scientists for their work on reprogramming mature cells to become pluripotent.

The prize of 10-million-Swedish-krona (US$1.5-million) was divided, one half jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon, age 79, at the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Shinya Yamanaka, age 50, at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan and the Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, California, USA, for the discovery that mature, specialized cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body.

Study Reveals How Green Tea Improves Memory

Green tea has been enjoyed for centuries, and its benefits have been widely touted. It is reputed to help treat many of modernity’s worst ills, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, HIV infection, and neurodegenerative diseases. New work done in China furthers the observations that green tea can help prevent neurodegeneration. The report, published in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, starts to elucidate the mechanism by which it does so [1].

Green tea