23andMe and The Parkinson’s Institute Announce Initiative to Advance Parkinson’s Disease Research

-
23andMe, a privately-held personal genetics company, and The Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center (“Parkinson’s Institute”) today announced a research initiative under which Parkinson’s Institute patients, with financial support from The Michael J. Fox Foundation, will enroll in the 23andMe Personal Genome Service™ to support the development of advanced methods for clinical and epidemiologic research for Parkinson’s disease.

The new research initiative is designed to improve current methods of collecting information for Parkinson’s research by leveraging the internet to dramatically expand the involvement of Parkinson’s patients in clinical research and increase the frequency and quality of patient data collection. Specifically:

  • Together, 23andMe and the Parkinson’s Institute will design and validate web-based clinical assessment tools that can be administered to online communities.
  • 23andMe will establish a social networking platform to facilitate the development of communities and research projects based on common traits of Parkinson’s disease patients.
  • All participating Parkinson’s Institute patients will be enrolled in the 23andMe Personal Genome Service™ and will provide a saliva sample for a comprehensive genome scan generating more than 580,000 data points per patient.
  • Parkinson’s Institute patients will provide specific information and insights that will include their individual environmental exposures, family history, disease progression and treatment response.
  • Patients’ risk factor and clinical data collected through the newly developed and validated web-based tools will then be merged with their genetic data to conduct research on Parkinson’s disease.
  • New surveys will be developed and administered to the growing cohort of patients, generating new risk factor and clinical data for comparison with the existing genetic data.
  • Through the deployment of an innovative approach to clinical research information gathering utilizing web-based tools, the initiative will help to expand the involvement of Parkinson’s disease patients in clinical research and increase the frequency and uniformity of patient data collection.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sequence Analysis is still sexy:Dual Descriptor Method for Biological Sequence Analysis

-
The emergence of “Systems Biology” in recent years highlights the systematic viewpoint of bio-system modeling. Building on such a background, Dual Descriptor Method, a generic methodology for biological sequence analysis is proposed. From a systematic perspective, Dual Descriptor is defined as a two element set of Composition Weight Map and Position Weight Function which aim at reflecting the composition and permutation information of a sequence. An alternate training algorithm is provided to get an optimum description of the building patterns of the sequences. In this paper , dual descriptor method has been applied to the analysis of two typical problems of molecular biology: gene identification and the prediction of protein function. Satisfactory and insightful results are achieved. Owing to the generality of this methodology, dual descriptor method has wide application perspective for many problems of pattern recognition, especially those involved in “Systems Biology”. Be a part of
Read more

Abbott Laboratories Buys Piramal Healthcare Limited Biz for $3.72B

-
Abbott May 21 announced a definitive agreement with Piramal Healthcare Limited to acquire full ownership of Piramal's Healthcare Solutions business (Domestic Formulations), a leader in the Indian branded generics market, for an up-front payment of $2.12 billion , plus $400 million annually for the next four years, giving Abbott the No. 1 position in the Indian pharmaceutical market. This further accelerates Abbott's emerging markets growth following the recent acquisition of Solvay Pharmaceuticals and announcements last week of Abbott's collaboration with Zydus Cadila as well as the creation of a new stand-alone Established Products Division to focus on expanding the global markets for its leading branded generics portfolio. "This strategic action will advance Abbott into the leading market position in India , one of the world's most attractive and rapidly growing markets," said Miles D. White , chairman and chief executive officer, Abbott. &quo
Read more

List of Cheminformatics Companies & Institutions

-
Accelrys ACD/Labs (Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc.) Afferent Systems Inc. Agilent Technologies Aureus Pharma Barnard Chemical Information Ltd. (John Barnard and Geoff Downs) SEE: digital chemistry Bio-Rad Laboratories BioReason BioSolveIT BlueObelisk.org Bruker Daltonics Inc. Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre CambridgeSoft Corporation CARB Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (NIST/University of Maryland) Cengent Therapeutics (Genes to Leads). Acquired by Inncardio, Inc. Center for Molecular Modeling (NIH) Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics CMBI (formerly: CAOS/CAMM: Dutch National Center for Computer-Assisted Chemistry and Molecular Modelling) Cerep ChemAxon ChemDiv, Inc. (Chemical Diversity) Chemical Abstracts Service Chemical Computing Group, Inc. Chemical Simulations Group ChemInnovation Software ChemNavigator ChemSW (Chemistry Software for Windows, formerly: WindowChem) Chenomx Inc. CIS Chemical Information System CombiChem.net CompuChem C
Read more