Kudos From Our Community

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We love sharing positive feedback we receive from the MSK community and beyond thanking us for our services. Here is a selection of kudos we’ve received over the last few weeks:

“Many thanks for sending these highly relevant papers and this absolutely fantastic search. This is so incredibly helpful and I am so grateful. The 3 papers you’ve included are directly relevant and so interesting. I really liked the first scale. Many thanks again for the fantastic Library service.”
Service: Literature Search

“Thank you so much for your exceptional service. It’s reassuring when I see that one of our requests is routed to your facility, because I know that rare is the time that you won’t come through for us. We appreciate you!”
Service: Document Delivery 

“I love librarians!!! Super smart people! Thank you for your time.”
 
 
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Nanoparticles and Light

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Source: Wenjing Wu

Designing drugs that attack only tumor cells but not healthy cells is complicated.

Xuequan Zhou, a PhD student from Leiden University, created an anticancer compound with a molecule that can self-organize in nanoparticles and become activated only under blue light irradiation. The new properties allow the drug to be activated only when needed and thus could be instrumental in killing cancer cells without damaging healthy cells. The research team conducted experiments in vitro and also in vivo using a mouse tumor model. The article is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Along similar lines, a team from Penn State University developed light-activated nanoparticles to target cancer cells. The nanoparticles can bind with microRNA (miRNA) molecules, and those can be released in the cancer cells when exposed to light, thus sparing healthy tissue. The miRNA molecules will then pair to a messenger mRNA and inhibit proteins’ production essential for cancer cells’ survival. The paper is published in Biomaterials.

 

RDM and COVID-19 (Part 3): Institutional Collaborations

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This is part 3 of a 4 part series of posts on Research Data Management and COVID-19. Click here for part 1 and part 2.

Collaborative efforts between institutions have yielded numerous open-access datasets, visualization tools, and resources designed to accelerate COVID-19 research by making datasets, tools, and computational resources  more discoverable and accessible. Examples include:

  • MIDAS – A “global network of scientists and practitioners from academia, industry, government, and non-governmental agencies” has created a COVID-19 portal which collates publicly available datasets and code to enable researchers to contribute towards COVID-19 modeling research.
    Midas Network
  • Terra – Terra provides cloud-based work spaces to support bioinformatics research by integrating data pipelines with analytical tools, such as Jupyter Notebook. They have set up specific work spaces to accelerate COVID-19 research. Access to Terra is free but requires an account setup. You can use your google account.Terra
  • VODAN – The Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN) is a collaborative effort between the Committee on Data Science and Technology (CODATA), the Research Data Alliance, World Data Systems, and GO FAIR; organizations which promote Open Science efforts in research data. In an effort to encourage best practices and standards for data repositories while still hastening access to COVID-19 data, these organization have created the FAIR Data Points repository which can be granted access to the local data of participating institutions, such as hospitals and research centers. VODAN can then assist institutions with data stewardship, best practices, and managed access to the data in their repositories.
    Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN) - GO FAIR
  • High Performance Computing Consortium – This consortium of academic, industry, government organizations pools available computing resources to provide accelerator services for participating members around COVID-19 research. Access to the computing resources are free but require submission and approval of a research proposal. Researchers utilizing the consortium resources are expected to maintain public updates of their progress and eventually publish their findings.
    IBM & DOE COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium

Likewise, there are numerous institution-specific sources of COVID-19 research data out there. No doubt many people are already aware of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center whose maps, visualizations, dashboards, and data connections have been used to display tracking by many news organizations, such as the NY Times’ global outbreak map. Another example is NYU’s list of ongoing data projects mobilized to combat COVID-19. Many of the on-going institution specific data projects are also being indexed by the above-mentioned government and generalist repositories. As a members of the Data Discovery Collaboration, the MSK Library has been participating in discussions about how institutions and researchers can best make their COVID-19 research more visible and useful to other researchers.

Interactive map from Johns Hopkins shows coronavirus

In the final post in this series, we’ll showcase some of the Data Repository and Publisher responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.