Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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biomedicine

Staring (cell) death in the face: imaging agents for necrotic cells

DNA usually occupies a privileged place inside the cell. Although cells in our body die all the time, an orderly process of disassembly (programmed cell death or apoptosis) generally keeps cellular DNA from leaking all over the place. DNA’s presence outside the cell means something is wrong: tissue injury has occurred and cells are undergoing necrosis.

Researchers from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University have devised a way to exploit the properties of extracellular DNA to create an imaging agent for injured tissue. Niren Murthy and Mike Davis recently published a paper in Organic Letters describing the creation of “Hoechst-IR.” This imaging agent essentially consists of the DNA-binding compound Hoechst 33258 (often used to stain cells before microscopy), attached to a dye that is visible in the near-infrared range. A water-loving polymer chain between the two keeps the new molecule from crossing cell membranes and binding DNA inside the cell.

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Posted on July 19, 2010 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Biomedical informatics impact on health care outcomes

Biomedical informatics is a multi-disciplinary field, involving the collection, management, analysis and integration of data in biomedicine used for research and healthcare delivery.

DNA double helix

DNA double helix

According to Joel H. Saltz, MD, PhD, director of Emory’s Center for Comprehensive Informatics, biomedical informatics enhances medical research via technology by making it possible to collect, weed through and analyze widespread data on patient treatments and outcomes.

Saltz is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and serves as chief medical information officer at Emory Healthcare and as a professor in the departments of pathology, biostatistics and bioinformatics, and mathematics and computer science at Emory.

Joel H. Saltz, MD, PhD

Joel H. Saltz, MD, PhD

A recent essay excerpted below, published by Knowledge@Emory, says advances in information technology are becoming increasingly critical to disease treatment and administrative efficiency at healthcare facilities.

Given the national debate over costs in the healthcare system, medical practitioners and IT experts say that the evolving field of biomedical informatics can provide large scale improvements in treatment processes, and ultimately, in the price tag for care.

Saltz notes in the article that biomedical informatics can be applied to any subset of medical research, giving clinicians access to “rich” or large pools of patient data and applying technological solutions and mathematical modeling to the process.

He says that the overarching goal of the Center is to foster collaboration between scientific and software systems researchers. However, the synthesis of medical information from disparate and numerous sources remains a key research effort at the Center and for other institutions and companies in the biomedical informatics field

The Center was selected recently as an In Silico Brain Tumor Research Center and will use advanced informatics tools and databases to discover more effective brain tumor treatments. Read here for more information about projects at the Center.

Posted on November 16, 2009 by admin in Uncategorized Leave a comment