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Gene Genie #31 at Adaptive Complexity May 11, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Blog Carnival, Gene Genie, genetics.
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The  31st edition is up at Adaptive Complexity. A great compilation of articles and blogposts about human genetics and personalized medicine. Thank you, Michael White, for hosting Gene Genie.

Gene Genie is the blog carnival of genes and gene-related diseases. Our plan is to cover the whole genome before 2082 (it means 14-15 genes every two weeks). We accept articles on the news of genomics and clinical genetics. The news and articles of personalized genetics are also included. Check out Gene Genie for more about this unique field of medicine.

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Many thanks to Ricardo Vidal for the logo!

The next edition is due to be published on the 25th of May but has no host at this time. If you are interested in hosting Gene Genie, drop me a mail. Don’t forget to submit your articles via the official page.

Here are all the issues of Gene genie:

The 21st Century in Medicine: What will it look like? May 10, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Computer, Health, Medicine, Personalized medicine, Robotics, Video, science.
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Jeffrey Dach used one of my recent posts (Personalized Medicine: Real Clinical Examples!) as a reference in his article describing the future of medicine. It’s a quite detailed and comprehensive essay about several fields of medicine and he doesn’t forget to mention personalized medicine and its impact on the future of healthcare:

Personalized Medicine is the combination of these two new powerful forces, Orthomolecular Medicine and Genetic Testing. In the future, Personalized Medicine will expand and ultimately play a dominant role in medicine. Example: Warfarin Genetic Testing allows improved calibration of coumadin dosage to avoid bleeding complications. Drug metabolism testing allows for personal modification of drug dosage.

Orthomolecular and personalized medicine together?

We will be able to sequence the entire genome of an individual human in milliseconds. The cost will be minimal and within the means of the average person.

Individuals will have ability to reprogram our own sperm and eggs. One will be able to buy new genes on the internet based on desired traits and features, and use these genes to make one’s own children as easily as buying a copy of Microsoft office.

My comment: If the government gets involved, then this sounds a lot like Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World.

Example of this new biotechnology: Human genes are inserted into microbes to make insulin. We will see a dramatic increase in gene therapies and treatments.

Well, I think and hope many of these will never come true, but it’s interesting to see how others predict the future. This fantastic video tries to show us some plans and projects that can really shape this century:

If you would like to know more about the future,

My Medical Career: Serving Medical Students May 10, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Community Site, Education, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
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My 5th year exam period is just about to begin, and I still need one more year to graduate from medical school as medical education takes 6 years in Hungary. I’ve been studying genetics for years and I’ve been trying to find good opportunities through my blog for more than a year now so I really know how hard it is to build a medical career. A new Australian service now aims to help medical students:

My Medical Career is an online career planning portal for Australian medical students and junior doctors. Our goal is to guide you through the process of selecting and achieving a career which best suits your interests, skills and lifestyle needs.

You start with

The idea is fantastic, I can’t wait to see something similar in Europe as well.

What’s on the web (2008 May 9) May 9, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Video, What's on the web?.
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  • Web 2.0 101 (My MD Journey): Videos about RSS, wikis, podcast or blogs:

A community-wide study in upstate New York found that nearly 28 percent of all visits to the pediatric emergency department could have been replaced with a more cost-effective Internet doctor’s “visit,” or telemedicine, according to investigators from the University of Rochester Medical Center.

  • The new medical bloggers’ list is up at Medblog.nl. Check it out!

Personalized Genetics: Privacy and the Virtual Gene May 7, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Genome, Health, Medicine, Personal Health Record, Personalized medicine, Video, genetics.
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Here is the regular post about the recent improvements of individualized medicine. This week, T. Ryan Gregory at Genomicron attempted to define the term genome. While The New York Times tried to redefine disease, genes and all.

What if a unauthorized person get access to the 23andme database? He will have a lot of information about many people. Ok, they can use strong encrypting algorithms but we know there is no 100% secure system. Maybe providing a anonymous service as Keyose this problem could be nearly totally prevented.

But this is not the only problem. Not at all!. What if I just take some of the spit of my new partner or my employee and send it to 23andme pretending to by my own spit? Then I could access to the genomic information of a third person without his/her permission. That sounds not really funny!

Google and Microsoft together on medical health records:

And if you’re fed up with these news about the personalized genetic companies, send a virtual gene to your friend in Facebook.

More here.

Medicine 2.0 carnival at Canadian Medicine May 7, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Blog Carnival, Medicine, Medicine 2.0.
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The 23rd edition is up at the Canadian Medicine! Check out the many posts and news about the world of medicine 2.0 and health 2.0. I’m thankful to the whole Canadian Medicine Team, and especially Sam Solomon, for hosting Medicine 2.0!

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Medicine 2.0 editions so far:

The next edition is due to be published on the 18th of May 2008 at My MD Journey.

Submit your blog article to the next edition of medicine 2.0 using our carnival submission form.

And read about this interesting and emerging field here.

NextBio: Life Sciences Data Search Engine May 5, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Bioinformatics, Medical Search, e-Science, science.
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Almost a year ago, I wrote NextBio was just like using Pubmed but in a more dynamic way. Now the public version was launched so it’s free for everyone.

With NextBio, in just one click users can search through thousands of studies with billions of data points spanning across different experimental platforms, organisms and data types. It also searches across millions of publications to help find new articles pertaining to your search query. NextBio’s data and literature search engine makes massive amounts of disparate biological, clinical and chemical data from public and proprietary sources searchable, regardless of data type and origin, empowering researchers to quickly understand their own experimental results within the context of other research.

I gave it a try by searching for psoriasis and it looked impressive as it offered me the subtypes of psoriasis to search for (auto-complete list).

There were some genes that can play a role in the pathogenesis of the disease and some groups as well. It would be interesting to see how and why it shows only these genes (take a look at Gene2Mesh for a clearer example).

And one more thing:

We process the world’s publicly available high-throughput data through a semi-automated analysis pipeline which involves comprehensive quality control steps and the manual review of studies by our experienced scientific team to ensure the highest quality final output. NextBio correlates gene ontology, pathway and other functional information within the context of the world’s experimental data.

I still need time to get used to this system but looks quite useful and can really ease the job of a scientist. Give it a try!

Further reading:

4 in 1: Video, podcast, photo and Pubmed May 5, 2008

Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Health, Medical Imaging, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.
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There are nearly 25 sites and services focusing on medical videos and animations on my list I’ve been working on for months. Here is the newest addition, The DAVE Project - Gastroenterology:

The DAVE Project, an acronym for the Digital Atlas of Video Education, is a collection of teaching tools. The project consists of a gastrointestinal endoscopy video atlas and medical lectures and presentations. The most recent additions to the collection are displayed below. Physicians are encouraged to submit material, for consideration, new entries to enrich and expand the atlas.

We can watch the videos or download them; listen to the podcast; see some related photos or do a Pubmed search in that specific field of interest.

DAVE stands for Digital Atlas of Video Education Gastroenterology…