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Showing posts from April, 2011

Biologics are the future of drug development

Drug development expenses have been going up while FDA approvals of new drug treatments have been going down. We know more about biology now than in the past so this increased understanding should make us more efficient and effective at finding new and improved treatments. This could be a low hanging fruit problem where we found the easier treatments and new treatment are getting harder to find. One of the main problems stopping new drug treatment approvals is side effects. To develop new drugs we identify a gene->protein target in a disease pathway, develop an assay that measures the activity of the gene->protein and test chemicals that down regulate or up regulate the gene target that affect other genes->proteins as little as possible. Finding a chemical compound that only affects the target and nothing else is quite difficult. A non-repetitive sequence of 20-25 nucleic acid base pairs is unique in the human genome. This means a biologic drug like an siRNA, anti-sense RN

Medical informatics aligned with health costs

I have been asked if medical informatics, computers and software in medicine, the field I am getting a PhD in, can reduce medical costs. I think medical informatics CAN reduce medical costs with emphasis on CAN if and only if there is motivation to use computers and software to reduce medical costs. Computer systems can track, remind, enable reuse of medical data like images, increase efficiency, reduce errors, determine the most cost effective treatments - reducing costs. All these good things ONLY end up reducing costs if our medical system is structured to motivate the stakeholders involved to reduce costs. I have heard one use of electronic medical records to increase the bill. It turns out when you go to the hospital and a dizzying assortment of physicians, nurses and medical specialists visit you and you receive a separate bill from almost every single person that saw you, they often forget to bill you for something. Electronic medical record systems can be used to make sure no

Prefer building software libraries to platforms

Build software as libraries. Prefer libraries to platforms. A library is made up of reusable functions, classes and objects that software developers include in their projects. And multiple libraries can be reused in the software developer's projects. A platform is often designed as software that gives software developers lots of features to reuse but makes  software developers add their project to the platform; the reverse of the library. Adding libraries to software developers' projects has many advantages to adding the project to the platform. Many libraries with different functionality can be combined together in the project. Adding a project to a platform means only the functionality of the platform can be reused. Platforms have another limitation. Functionality from a platform for building one kind of application, like command line applications is difficult to reuse in another kind of application, like a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or a web app or a cell phone app. Li