A recent meeting of researchers at The National Cancer Institute (NCI) detailed updates on the Exceptional Responders Initiative, a program created to gain insights into the emerging field of exceptional responders in cancer (patients who have a major and long-lasting response to treatments that were not nearly as effective for similar patients). The NCI has just written up a summary of the developing pilot study.
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Category Archives: Do You Know?
Do You Know that Supercomputers Can Assist in Finding Better Cancer Drugs?
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin has made advances in computing to assist researchers with discovering more effective chemotherapy drugs. TACC employs three projects for carrying out this process with their supercomputers: virtual screening, molecular modeling, and evolutionary analyses.
Could Many Published Medical Findings Be False?
A new article published in this month’s Annual Reviews delves into the issue that many published medical findings may actually be false. This concern has been written about before, notably in PLoS in 2005, but the authors here attempt to describe the issues with data analysis practices and “point to tools and behaviors that can be implemented to reduce the problems with published scientific results.”
The authors, Jeffrey T. Leek and Leah R. Jager of Johns Hopkins, begin by defining false discoveries in medical research. They describe how scientific publishing was created before the age of modern computing, statistics, data analysis software and the Internet. The overabundance of data, compounded by the pressure to produce positive results by groups like funding agencies, has created a cloud of suspicion over published research. They believe that it “is possible to confuse correlation with causation, a predictive model may overfit the training data, a study may be underpowered, and results may be overinterpreted or misinterpreted by the scientific press.”
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