Cardiovascular models are moving to the bedside
Pacemakers, heart-lung machines, stents and artificial hearts all sprang from successful partnerships between engineers and doctors. “From its inception in the 1950s, heart surgery has...
Mar, 01, 2014
Either/or molecular circuitry modeled
To differentiate or not to differentiate? That is the question constantly faced by embryonic stem cells. And they seem to answer it decisively at the behest of a molecular trio of transcription...
Dec, 31, 2006
Simulations can teach us how young bodies and faces develop; how an artery compensates for decades of fatty plaque deposits by growing and thickening its walls; how tissue engineers can best coax endothelial cells to develop into organized sheets of skin for burn patients; and how cancerous tumors invade neighboring tissue.
For better or for worse, and on many levels, our tissues never stop growing and changing. While developing from childhood to old age, we grow not only bone, cartilage, fat, muscle and skin, but also...
Mar, 31, 2008
Computational modeling can help fill gaps in how we develop and review new drugs and devices
What role does computational modeling play at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? If you ask Paul Watkins, MD, director of the Hamner—University of North Carolina...
Aug, 31, 2011
How can we make data sharing less daunting in order to address the scientific reproducibility problem?
Biomedical data is undergoing an identity crisis.
“How can that be?” you may ask. It’s data: bits of information stored on servers somewhere; sequences of nucleotides in a...
Mar, 31, 2016
3D images help physicians design appropriate interventions.
Images of realistic and colorful 3D human body parts line the hall outside the lab. Blood and muscle look like blood and muscle; bone looks like bone. You almost expect to find human cadavers being...
Aug, 31, 2011
Where simulation and theory converge
For decades, scientists have believed that DNA of short lengths (150 base pairs or fewer) behaves as a relatively stiff rod—able to quiver a bit, but rarely forming a circle or tight angle...
Mar, 31, 2007
How bioinformatics tools are bringing insight to the environmental side of the health equation
When it comes to what kills people, Nurture trumps Nature: Chronic diseases with overwhelmingly environmental (rather than genetic) causes are responsible for the deaths of two-thirds of the world...
Nov, 01, 2016
An opportunity and a challenge
When discussing biocomputation startups, there’s one thing people agree on: These days, they don’t generate much excitement among venture capitalists.
“In the 1990s, there...
Mar, 31, 2007
Simulations offer novel insights
Zooming in on a virus reveals a physical marvel. It can stuff a genome into a confined space (a protein casing called a capsid). It can eject its genome rapidly and fluidly into a cell. And it can...
Jun, 01, 2015
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