Imagine the analytical laboratory of the future. What will the lab look like? What will its workflow be? Who will be working there? Laboratories everywhere are grappling with these questions and more – and are turning to Lab 4.0 for answers. What’s Lab 4.0? It’s the term currently used to convey a vision of intelligent …

Transitional medicine applies basic research like drug development to clinical applications and encourages a flow of information from the lab to the clinic, and back. This practice is lab- and data-driven, aspiring to make a bench-to-bedside approach that’ll efficiently develop therapeutic strategies. It identifies biomarkers that can then be used to inform the patient’s molecular …

The recent Pistoia Alliance Symposium in London focused on the role of Bioinformatics in supporting Precision Medicine. There were some very interesting use cases ranging from principle concepts of bioinformatics to clinical applications to the importance of HPC and cloud for scaling up bioinformatics applications within the clinical setting. Below are some of the take-home …

At a recent Bioinformatics Strategy Meeting in Boston, I chaired an interesting roundtable discussion on the potential convergence of translational research and clinical development. The usual culprits within the data life cycle were discussed such as effective data integration, large enough (but optimal) datasets, data harmonization, deep learning versus machine learning, but also how the …

A recent review very succinctly put it that for precision medicine to achieve its aim of “the right drug for the right patient at the right time, may be possible only if the right data come to the right clinic at the right time”. In the field of oncology itself, millions of dollars have been …

A few weeks ago I attended the Festival of Genomics in London and amongst the various interesting topics that were discussed the age old question of biomedical data integration featured heavily and still remains a primary (or rather a priority) focus. All this talk of the richness and diversity of the biomedical datasets reminded me …

It’s a well-accepted truism that drug discovery is hard (only 10% of potential new drugs make it to market), expensive ($2.6B and counting), and time consuming (12 years from bench to bedside). Biopharma companies continue to look for ways to address these threats to success and to make the process easier, cheaper, and quicker; their …

I know what you’re asking, “Is this a marketing turn-of-phrase or an attainable outcome?” A Medical Monitor’s top priority is to protect clinical trial subjects by monitoring safety signals in the data. To that end, what are your medical monitor’s processes and what technology are they using to ensure focused medical data review, increased subject …

I am an apprentice working at Lancaster University as a Chemical Engineering Technician. In this capacity I study 1 day per week as well as working as a technician at the university. I have 7 years of professional laboratory experience, initially starting as a laboratory technician in the food industry and now as a Chemical …

Infographics as a Powerful Communication Tool: We live in a world of displays: on laptops, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches. These devices bring together technologies to make our lives better, but, above all, their key feature is that they’re primarily visual. Rich colors, high resolutions, and bright backlights enable an engaging experience. It is not surprising that …