How to get the right treatment to the right patient at the right time University of Glasgow leads the way in new global drug treatments The University of Glasgow is launching the first ever Masters programme designed to specifically address the new paradigm in drug discovery stratified medicine which tailors drug therapies to individual patients genetic makeup. The University of Glasgow is at the forefront of stratified medicine, which involves examining the genetic makeup of patients and their differing responses to drugs designed to treat specific diseases the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. The course director of the new MSc in Clinical Trials and Stratified Medicine, Professor Matthew Walters, said: Stratified Medicine holds huge potential in the timely development of new treatments for human disease. It is among the most important concepts to emerge in 21stcentury clinical science and will be a crucial component of the global drive to increase the efficacy, safety and cost-effectiveness of new treatments. He added: There has been global recognition of the need for training in this area so that we have young drug researchers in academia and the commercial environment imbued with the skills required to apply the science … Continue reading →

A new study from Princeton University sheds light on the handing over of genetic control from mother to offspring early in development. Learning how organisms manage this transition could help researchers understand larger questions about how embryos regulate cell division and differentiation into new types of cells. The study, published in the March 12 issue of the journal Cell, provides new insight into the mechanism for this genetic hand-off, which happens within hours of fertilization, when the newly fertilized egg is called a zygote. "At the beginning, everything the embryo needs to survive is provided by mom, but eventually that stuff runs out, and the embryo needs to start making its own proteins and cellular machinery," said Princeton postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Molecular Biology and first author Shelby Blythe. "We wanted to find out what controls that transition." Blythe conducted the study with senior author Eric Wieschaus, Princeton's Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology, Professor of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine. Researchers have known that in most animals, a newly fertilized egg cell divides rapidly, producing exact copies of itself using … Continue reading →

Photo: Andrew Brookes/Corbis In 2005, next-generation sequencing began to change the field of genetics research. Obtaining a persons entire genome became fast and relatively cheap. Databases of genetic information were growing by the terabyte, and doctors and researchers were in desperate need of a way to efficiently sift through the information for the cause of a particular disorder or for clues to how patients might respond to treatment. Companies have sprung up over the past five years that are vying to produce the first DNA search engine. All of them have different tacticssome even have their own proprietary databases of genetic informationbut most are working to link enough genetic databases so that users can quickly identify a huge variety of mutations. Most companies also craft search algorithms to supplement the genetic information with relevant biomedical literature. But as in the days of the early Web, before Google reigned supreme, a single company has yet to emerge as the clear winner. Making a functional search engine is a classic big-data problem, says Michael Gonzalez, the vice president of bioinformatics at one such company, ViaGenetics, which was expected to relaunch its platform in March. Before doctors or researchers can use the data, … Continue reading →