Life Science
By Meredith Salisbury | May 17, 2013, 11:30 AM | Techonomy Exclusive
It’s no secret that crowdsourcing has been a successful approach in many industries. Even complex and technical topics can be addressed this way; one great example is Foldit, an online game that lets regular people design efficient protein structures. Those designs are submitted to a top protein laboratory, which tests to see whether predicted structures match the real-life structures of specific proteins. In the biomedical community, though, Foldit is an outlier. The concept of pulling in as many minds and resources as possible to solve a problem, though proven to work repeatedly in other industries, has not gained real traction in life sciences. More
Life Science Opinion
By Jonathan Bush | May 13, 2013, 5:49 PM | Techonomy Exclusive
Some are celebrating the increasing levels of venture capital flowing to health information technology startups. But I’m in the business of cloud-based electronic health record services, and I’m not celebrating. In fact, I consider current levels of VC funding for my industry to be tragic. In a 2013 first quarter report, Mercom Capital Group reported that “the sector continues to explode in another record quarter with almost half a billion dollars ($493 million) raised.” But VC levels pale in comparison to what the federal government has ponied up: $30 billion under the HITECH Act to encourage adoption of health IT. More
Energy & Green Tech Life Science
By Adrienne Burke | May 8, 2013, 2:56 PM
A fundraising campaign for a DIY biology project to genetically engineer "sustainable natural lighting" was going gangbusters on Kickstarter. And that was before it was featured on page B1 of the New York Times today. But not all of the attention has been supportive. More
(Via The New York Times)
Life Science
By Adrienne Burke | April 30, 2013, 1:04 PM | Techonomy Exclusive
It might be surprising to hear a tobacco giant described as a tech innovator. But Philip Morris researchers are pioneering new territory with a crowdsourced approach to checking the accuracy of life sciences data. In partnership with computational biologists at IBM’s Watson Research Center, Philip Morris's so-called sbv IMPROVER project creates open challenges to encourage scientists to augment traditional peer reviews of research data. On Monday, Philip Morris launched its Species Translation Challenge, which will award three $20,000 prizes to teams whose results best define how well rodent tests can predict human outcomes. More
Life Science
By Meredith Salisbury | April 24, 2013, 8:41 AM | Techonomy Exclusive
Here’s a holiday you’ve probably never celebrated: April 25 is DNA Day! It honors the publication of the original 1953 paper from James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and others first describing the double-helix structure of DNA. In more recent times, the day has also commemorated the Human Genome Project, declared complete in April 2003. This year, DNA Day marks the 60th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery as well as the Human Genome Project’s 10th anniversary. More
Digital Life Science
By Adrienne Burke | April 23, 2013, 7:00 PM
Fans of Dr. Lisa Sanders's "Diagnosis" column, which invites New York Times readers to guess what's causing anonymous patients' mysterious ailments, will love the idea behind CrowdMed, a business that announced its beta launch and $1.1 million in seed funding at TEDMED in Washington last week. CrowdMed is a crowdsourcing platform that taps the collective wisdom of regular folks to produce diagnostic suggestions for baffling cases. More
(Via MobiHealthNews)
Life Science
By Christie Rizk | April 23, 2013, 5:11 PM | Techonomy Exclusive
Those who tuned in to President Obama's State of the Union speech in February might have missed a brief mention of a project some say will catalyze an entire new industry devoted to understanding the brain. "Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s," Obama said. "Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race." This brain mapping effort is the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (or BRAIN) Initiative, proposed jointly by the President and researchers. Obama has called it one of this century's "Grand Challenges," akin to mapping the human genome, or sending a man to the moon. More
Life Science
By Adrienne Burke | April 22, 2013, 2:54 PM
Supercomputers and DNA sequencing instruments are the weapons of choice in an "arms race within the war on cancer." Medical centers in New York City alone are reportedly spending more than $1 billion on building, equipping, and staffing new genomic research centers. More
(Via The New York Times)
Life Science
By Adrienne Burke | April 19, 2013, 6:58 PM
"If you think about the scientific revolutions that have occurred in history, they've been driven by one thing--the availability of data. From Copernicus to quantum mechanics, it's data that drives innovation." So says computational biologist John Quackenbush in an interview in the May edition of Fast Company. And despite all the talk about massive amounts of genomic data being churned out by next-generation sequencing instruments, much of it is not actually available, at least not in the way Quackenbush and a lot of cancer patients want it to be. More
(Via Fast Company)
Digital Life Science
By Karen Edelman | April 15, 2013, 3:01 PM
The applications of crowdfunding—leveraging technology to raise small contributions from the many—continue to grow. The crowdfunding platform is now being utilized to finance disaster relief, build startups, develop scientific research, support artists and musicians, develop inventions, enable citizen journalism, and aid political campaigns. Now a former Peace Corps volunteer, 26-year-old Chase Adam, is using crowdfunding to increase access to healthcare in 13 developing countries. More
(Via The New York Times)
