Monthly Archives: February 2014

Innovation versus regulation in mobile health technology

Mobile healthcare applications – or “apps” – are having an increasingly profound impact on medicine; it is estimated that within 5 years, 50% of mobile device users will have downloaded healthcare apps. With drastic improvements in technology in the last few years, mobile medical apps now range from drug databases to sophisticated monitors that can… Read more »

Medicine
1

Creating better care for people with rare diseases

Doctors with patient

In this guest post for Rare Disease Day, Alastair Kent OBE, Director of Genetic Alliance UK and Chair of Rare Disease UK, looks at what’s been achieved for patients with rare diseases and how open access journals are playing their part. For many years rare diseases (defined as those that affect fewer than 5 in… Read more »

Medicine

Learning from the mistakes of others: Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine moves to open peer review

Flowchart

‘A wise man learns by the mistakes of others, a fool by his own’ Latin proverb This is especially true in evidence-based medicine. While it is often the ‘positive’ data—those that support carefully-constructed hypotheses—that get the most attention, non-confirmatory, so-called ‘negative’, data have an integral role to play in guiding future research. Indeed, even if… Read more »

Medical Evidence Medicine
1

Celiac disease: controversies and comorbidities

antibody therapy crop

Celiac disease (CD) is an autoimmune digestive condition affecting approximately 1 in 100 people worldwide. The symptoms of celiac disease – including diarrhea, bloating and abdominal pain – occur as a result of the body’s immune system mistakenly attacking gluten proteins, causing damage to the surface of the small intestine. The symptoms of CD can… Read more »

Medicine

Tissue chips: advancing disease modeling and drug discovery

Stem cell supplement

A partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to develop 3D-human cell-based tissue chips to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of drug screening. The program is featured in a recent supplement in Stem Cell Research & Therapy: Stem… Read more »

Medicine