Amid the growing debate about the high price of powerful new drugs in the United States, a recent analysis suggests that breakthrough therapies for blood cancers may, in many cases and with some important caveats, provide reasonable value for money spent. Researchers present this viewpoint, based upon a comprehensive analysis of published cost-effectiveness ratios, online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).
Tech
Hundreds of ships go missing each year, but we have the technology to find them
By Nigel Bannister, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at University of Leicester
Unlike slow and steady batteries, supercapacitors gulp up energy rapidly and deliver it in fast, powerful jolts. A growing array of consumer products is benefiting from these energy-storage devices, reports Chemical & Engineering News, with cars and trucks -- and their drivers -- poised to be major beneficiaries.
For decades, researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI, worked on specialized problems, developing theoretical concepts and workable algorithms for various aspects of the field. Computer vision, planning and reasoning experts all struggled independently in areas that many thought would be easy to solve, but which proved incredibly difficult.
Inserting a specific strain of bacteria into the microenvironment of aggressive ovarian cancer transforms the behavior of tumor cells from suppression to immunostimulation, researchers at Norris Cotton Cancer Center and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth have found. The findings, published in OncoImmunology, demonstrate a new approach in immunotherapy that can be applied in a variety of cancer types.
By Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Co-Director Centre for Commercial Law at Bond University.
Cloud computing, by its very nature, transcends location, geography and territorial boundaries. Data accessed in one country might be stored half way across the world, or even in servers in multiple countries.
International law, on the other hand, sees the world through the lens of various jurisdictions, which are inherently linked to location, geography and territorial boundaries.
Public participation should be at the heart of big data projects in health care and biomedical research, according to the findings of a new report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The report calls for greater transparency about how people's data are used, and recommends the introduction of criminal penalties in the UK for the misuse of data.
The report warns that by not taking into account people's preferences and values, projects that could deliver significant public good may continue to be challenged and fail to secure public confidence.
Which breast cancer patients need to have underarm lymph nodes removed? Mayo Clinic-led research is narrowing it down. A new study finds that not all women with lymph node-positive breast cancer treated with chemotherapy before surgery need to have all of their underarm nodes taken out. Ultrasound is a useful tool for judging before breast cancer surgery whether chemotherapy eliminated cancer from the underarm lymph nodes, the researchers found. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
A new technique reported in The FASEB Journal suggests that during early stages, it might be possible to reverse age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness that is currently irreversible. The treatment involving a nanosecond laser may also have further implications for other eye diseases such as diabetic macular edema, diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity.
A new sensor can detect ambient levels of mercury in the atmosphere. This new highly sensitive, laser-based instrument provides scientists with a method to more accurately measure global human exposure to mercury. The measurement approach is called sequential two-photon laser induced fluorescence (2P-LIF) and uses two different laser beams to excite mercury atoms and monitor blue shifted atomic fluorescence.
If you can't find the ideal material, then design a new one.
Northwestern University's James Rondinelli uses quantum mechanical calculations to predict and design the properties of new materials by working at the atom-level. His group's latest achievement is the discovery of a novel way to control the electronic band gap in complex oxide materials without changing the material's overall composition.
Much of our reams of data sit in large databases of unstructured text. Finding insights among emails, text documents, and websites is extremely difficult unless we can search, characterize, and classify their text data in a meaningful way.
One of the leading big data algorithms for finding related topics within unstructured text (an area called topic modeling) is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). But when Northwestern University professor Luis Amaral set out to test LDA, he found that it was neither as accurate nor reproducible as a leading topic modeling algorithm should be.
Finding out whether you have been infected with dengue may soon be as easy as spitting into a rapid test kit. The Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR has developed a paper-based disposable device that will allow dengue-specific antibodies to be detected easily from saliva within 20 minutes. This device is currently undergoing further development for commercialization.
Three UC San Diego researchers say they can predict the spread of flu a week into the future with as much accuracy as Google Flu Trends can display levels of infection right now.
The study - appearing in Scientific Reports, an online journal from the publishers of Nature - uses social network analysis and combines the power of Google Flu Trends' "big data" with traditional flu monitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bitcoin is the digital world's most popular "virtual currency", with millions in circulation. Fraudulent schemes have scammed at least $11 million in these virtual deposits from customers over the past four years, according to new cyber-security research from Southern Methodist University.
In the first empirical study of its kind, the authors found that four different types of schemes using authentic-looking web-based investment and banking outlets lured customers so deposits could be stolen.