Content about health and medicine

May 2, 2012

For years, researchers believed that Parkinson's disease is caused by the long 'fibrils' found in the neurons of people with Parkinson's disease. Now new computational models show that the real cause may be tiny, oft-overlooked ring structures.

May 2, 2012

‘One-stop shop’ saves time & money for life sciences

A new project connects life science researchers with software developers, enabling faster and more accurate computations to be done.

April 18, 2012

Computing and cone snail creates new painkiller

The toxic venom of the underwater cone snail Conus consors may soon prove to be the therapeutic answer for human sufferers of a debilitating and incurable neurological disorder called dystonia. The latest structural biology techniques and the grid are helping to speed-up the development of a new product that is already at the pre-clinical trial stage.

March 28, 2012

Solving Alzheimer’s and related disorders globally

What happens to all the brain scans when a neuroscience study is over? Are the images stored? Can another researcher run the same algorithm from the study, but on a different set of brain images? And if a researcher in India accessed brain scans taken in the UK, for example, would there be enough supporting clinical and image data to make it useful? In February, a high-level workshop was held in Geneva, Switzerland, to address these issues.

Your iSGTW correspondants interviewed several participants on video, and you can view these in the article.

February 21, 2012

neuGRID, the European online diagnosis environment for Alzheimer’s, goes global with outGRID and the United Nations

Geneva, 20 February 2012

neuGRID, a cloud-computing infrastructure funded by the European Commission that stores and analyses a vast database of 3D brain scans, is now expanding globally to help find treatments for Alzheimer’s. This ground-breaking initiative will help develop a global online system to centralise and boost Alzheimer’s research initiatives.

February 1, 2012

Malaria vaccination plans helped along by volunteers

When a malaria vaccine becomes available, it could be effective to vaccinate people of all ages in low transmission areas in addition to the plans to vaccinate only infants in high transmission areas, according to a Swiss team that ran simulations using malariacontrol.net, a popular volunteer computing project.

January 18, 2012

Hunting for viruses: finding a needle in a haystack

Respiratory infections are the main reason why children under five end up in hospital. However, in up to 40% of the cases it’s not possible to define the exact cause of the disease and in many cases this is because the viruses are still unknown to science.

Grid computing is helping a Dutch team identify more viruses, which improves the chances of correct diagnostics and helps to determine the best treatment for patients.

January 18, 2012

The Royal Society opens up permanently

The Royal Society has made 60,000 of its historical scientific papers free and permanently available online.

November 30, 2011

Identifying a protein treasure trove with the grid

Today’s biologists face a difficult problem: their treasure trove of protein structures is exciting, but of little use if they don’t know what those proteins are for.

The Protein Data Bank, where data about proteins with known structures are stored, contains millions of proteins that scientists can freely access. But in most cases, the biological purpose of those proteins is unknown.

November 23, 2011

Wireless worries

Will fears of the health risks associated with wireless devices ultimately prove to be groundless? Researchers create a virtual body model to help find answers.

November 16, 2011

Cloud computing helps decode German E. coli strain

Over summer, a nasty strain of E. coli hit Europe, stiking victims with life-threatening complications far more often than most strains — and the search for an explanation began.

November 2, 2011

A match made in Sweden

Swedish researchers have developed a computer model that is better at matching transplant candidates to living donors than traditional methods, and as a result could improve long-term survival rates for transplant recipients.

Weight, gender, age, blood group (of both donor and recipient), and the time when no blood flows to the heart during a transplant are just some of the numerous variables that can affect a patient’s survival chances after transplantation.

October 12, 2011

Don’t stop the beat

40% of rejected drugs developed by the pharmaceutical industry fail due to their adverse affects on the heart. Now, researchers from the preDiCT project have built the most accurate computer models ever to help the pharmaceutical industry know which drugs are more likely to disrupt electrical activity in the heart.

PreDiCT is just one of 26 projects that are part of the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative - it's goal is the creation of a 'virtual you', down to your face, skin, muscle, bones and DNA. These simulations will greatly improve disease, drug and health treatments for the public.