Pharma Podcasts
Learn how you can use podcasts to keep up to date in areas like genomics, bioinformatics, cancer research, drug discovery and drug development.
Pancreatic Cancer and the Microbiome
Beyond the genomic complexity of the disease, we’ve begun to examine the effect of the microbiome on pancreatic cancer. In a recent paper in Science, “Potential role of intratumor bacteria in mediating tumor resistance to the chemotherapeutic drug gemcitabine” [Geller et al] reported that 76% of pancreatic cancer patients in their study (n=113) had gammaproteobacteria in
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Subtypes of Pancreatic Cancer
In the third part of this series on pancreatic cancer, we’ll take a look at recent developments in identifying subtypes of pancreatic cancer and its potential impact on the lives of pancreatic cancer patients. Twenty-one years ago, we had identified some of the histologically distinct types of pancreatic cancer. These neoplastic tissue types included: PanINs
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The Genetics of Pancreatic Cancer
In the second part of this series on pancreatic cancer, we’ll look at the changes in our understanding of the role of familial genetics in pancreatic cancer, and how that new understanding holds promise for new therapeutics. In the mid-1970s doctors began reporting cases of familial pancreatic cancer, where multiple first-degree relatives had presented with
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Remember, Remember…
A look at our changing understanding of the genetics of pancreatic cancer, and the genomic technologies that helped us gain that understanding over the past 21 years.
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PubMed vs EuropePMC: Let’s Get Ready To Rumble
PubMed For most researchers, PubMed is the go-to resource for all biomedical literature. But from a programmatic standpoint it has some real challenges that make it difficult to integrate into many informatics applications. Let’s take a look at a typical application. Suppose we have an internal application used for target identification and tracking, and we
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A New Year, A New Site, A New Service
It’s the start of a new year, and nothing says New Year like a website refresh. With the rise in the number of visitors to the site using mobile browsers, we’ve updated the site to make it more mobile friendly. Not only is it more easily viewable on smartphones and tablets, but you can add
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Drug Target Identification: And then a miracle occurs
At the front end of most drug discovery programs lies a step called Target Identification, and a few months ago I sat down with a colleague to discuss their approach to target identification. In particular, “how do you characterize a target”? I was surprised at how much that process can vary from company to company. As
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Exchanging Drug Pipeline Data
The pharmaceutical R&D environment has always been collaborative in nature — never moreso today. Key to the success of those collaborations is the ability to share information about drug R&D programs with a wide variety of potential partners and investors. Traditionally pharmaceutical companies rely on expensive databases to identify potential partners. These databases usually do a
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Parsing Data Files With BioGroovy
In a previous post we showed how you can use BioGroovy to download a data file from a webservice. In this post, we’ll show you how to parse the file that you’ve downloaded. After handling all of the imports (shown in the first block of code), the real work starts with the EntrezGeneSlurper. We create a
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