Category Archives: LCOI

We Like April 27th: Open Source Language for Programming Cells, Crowdsourced Verification during Crisis, John Cleese on Creativity 1

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Bioengineers Build Open Source Language for Programming Cells

Image: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

Drew Endy wants to build a programming language for the body.

Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. That may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the project is already underway, and the team intends to open source the language, so that other scientists can use it and modify it and perfect it.

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Patient registries and their role in clinical development 2

by • Clinical Trials, Data Management, LCOI • Tags: , ,

Photo Courtesy of http://www.niknightswbc.btck.co.uk/ParalympicsLondon2012 Photo Courtesy of http://www.niknightswbc.btck.co.uk/ParalympicsLondon2012%5B/caption%5D

Do you donate blood? Or perhaps you’re an organ donor. If so, you see the value in contributing – literally, a part of yourself – to the greater good. In addition, you may see the potential direct benefit for you or those you care for. Blood and organ donations are now common practice, and it’s easy to see that their value is irrefutable.

What if we extended this concept to data about diseases. Patient registries are ways to bring data together to be used to understand disease, identify clinical trial participants, and, potentially provide statistical power to help develop new disease treatments.

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We Like, April 19th: Using Brain Waves to Block Calls, Crowdsourced Stock Market Advice, and 4-D Printing Reply

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App Uses Brain Waves to Block Calls

tech_innovator17__01__630x420Neuroscientist and former software engineer Ruggero Scorcioni found himself consistently distracted by the phone while he was trying to work. “If I’m busy coding or thinking about research and have phone calls coming in, it’s hard to get back into the same mental state,” says Scorcioni, 42. “Maybe you had a great idea, but then it’s gone.” In January, on a whim, he entered an AT&T app-development hackathon, and came up with a solution.

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We Like, April13: Open Innovation at NASA, iWatch to Measure more than Time, Connecting Health with Google Glass, and Google Fiber as a Catalyst for Start-Ups Reply

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How Open Innovation is Solving Some of NASA’s Trickiest Problems

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As head of the Human Health and Performance Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Dr. Jeffrey Davis leads a team with a very unique charge: They are tasked with solving human health issues — in outer space.

In all, Davis’ team is dealing with about 45 different health problems related to long-duration space flight — everything from bone loss and muscle decay to water recycling and food preservation. More…