Author Interviews, Biomarkers, Personalized Medicine / 27.10.2024

  Advanced screening techniques are changing healthcare by making it easier to find and treat diseases earlier. These new technologies are helping doctors and researchers improve the way they diagnose these diseases and create better treatments. A key area where these techniques are making a big impact is in antibody discovery. It helps scientists find important proteins that can be used to fight diseases like cancer and autoimmune disorders. In this article, we’ll look at how advanced screening techniques are changing healthcare, how they help with antibody discovery, and what the future might hold for these technologies. (more…)
Concierge Medicine, Health Care Systems / 21.10.2024

The concierge medicine industry has been around for a while and was already worth $6.7 billion in 2023 with an estimated CAGR of 10.37%. This solution fills an apparent gap in the healthcare industry and has many benefits to offer to patients. Unlike traditional primary care, concierge clinics prioritize patients and give them personalized attention. Appointments aren’t rushed and access to physicians is available on demand. Concierge doctors don’t simply provide convenience to their patients – they improve their health outcomes and even build stronger doctor-patient relationships. The benefits of concierge medicine are numerous, so we’ve summarized the most important ones. In this blog, we will tell you how concierge doctors give a top-notch patient experience and help their patients stay healthy over the long term with preventive medicine. (more…)
Biomarkers, Personalized Medicine / 17.10.2024

  biomarkers-personalized-medicine.png   Key Takeaways
  • Biomarkers are measurable biological indicators that can help in diagnosing diseases, predicting disease progression, and guiding treatment decisions.
  • They are essential for personalized medicine, allowing treatments to be tailored specifically to an individual's biological profile.
  • Targeted therapies and early detection of diseases, especially in cancer treatment, have greatly benefited from biomarker research.
  • Tools like Western blotting and ELISA are commonly used to detect and analyze biomarkers, contributing to more precise medical decisions.
  • While challenges exist, including cost and ethical concerns, biomarkers are paving the way for more accurate and effective healthcare.
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Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Heart Disease, Nature / 14.06.2024

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ben Omega Petrazzini, B.Sc. Associate Bioinformatician Ron Do Laboratory Ron Do, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences Director, Center for Genomic Data Analytics Associate Director in Academic Affairs, The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine Charles Bronfman Professor in Personalized Medicine Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai     MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Rare coding variants directly affect protein function and can inform the role of a gene in disease. Discovery of rare coding variant associations for coronary artery disease (CAD) to date have only had limited success. Genetic studies typically use standard phenotyping approaches to classify cases versus controls for CAD. However, this phenotyping approach doesn’t capture disease progression or severity in individuals. We recently introduced an in-silico score for CAD (ISCAD) that tracks CAD progression, severity, underdiagnosis and mortality (Forrest et al. The Lancet, 2023, PMID 36563696). ISCAD was built using a machine learning model trained on clinical data from electronic health records (EHR). Importantly, ISCAD is a quantitative score that measures CAD on a spectrum. The quantitative nature of the score provides an opportunity to discover additional rare coding variant associations that may not have been detected with the standard case-control phenotyping approach. Here in this study, we performed a large-scale rare variant association study in the exome sequences of 604,915 individuals for ISCAD, a machine learning-based score for CAD. (more…)
Author Interviews, Blood Pressure - Hypertension, Personalized Medicine / 11.04.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Johan Sundström, MD, PhD Professor of Epidemiology at Uppsala University Professorial Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health Cardiologist at Uppsala University Hospital MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: High blood pressure, hypertension, is a growing global health challenge. Over the last 30 years, the number of people with hypertension has doubled, and it is estimated that around a third of adults aged 30-79 have the condition - a total of 1.28 billion people worldwide. Untreated hypertension can lead to kidney disease, heart disease, and stroke, accounting for 11.3 million deaths in 2021 alone. A small minority get their blood pressure under control with drug therapy, and some studies indicate that as little as half are taking their blood pressure medications as intended. Is this because the drugs' effectiveness and side effects differ between different individuals? If so, there would be a substantial risk that patients will not get their optimal medication on the first try, with poor blood pressure lowering and unnecessary side effects as a result. In a new clinical trial in Sweden, it was studied whether there is an optimal blood pressure medication for each person, and thus a potential for personalized blood pressure treatment. In the study, 280 people with high blood pressure tried out four different blood pressure drugs on several different occasions over a total of one year. (more…)