Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Courtesy Genomeweb & Julia Karow   Studying for a dual degree in mathematics and molecular biology, Nick Tatonetti became interested in using computational models to study biology and make sense of its massive datasets. As a bioinformatics PhD student at Stanford, he developed new statistical models and computational approaches for analyzing drug effects and drug-drug interactions. At Columbia, Tatonetti is now focusing on molecular mechanisms of drugs. "We can actually think of each time a patient is being given a drug as an experiment," he says. "When the drug goes into the human system, it interacts molecularly, and then phenotypes come out of this system," which can be connected to molecular mechanisms in new ways. In particular, he is developing techniques that use clinical data to develop networks that highlight interactions between different systems in the human body, such as two organs. "And once we know that certain gene produc...

NextBio said this week that it is partnering with Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute and the Aflac Cancer Center to work on identifying biomarkers that can predict brain cancer metastasis in children, which will help clinicians determine which patients should receive radiation therapy. The partners will use NextBio Clinical software to analyze and interpret molecular and genomic data collected from children with medulloblastoma, a childhood brain tumor that affects around 500 children in the US every year and accounts for 20 percent of all brain cancers in children below the age of 19. Specifically, “this study will look at clinical and genomic data from real patients, as well as data from mouse models and frozen human tissue samples, and then will correlate these data sets with other data from the public domain,” Alpana Verma-Alag, NextBio’s head of clinical development, explained in a statement. Tobey MacDonald, director of Aflac’s brain tumor prog...