NIH Announcements, ESMO Guidelines and More…

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Surfing the web, I uncovered these new items worth sharing:

  • The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), Cancer Research UK, Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Dutch foundation Hubrecht Organoid Technology will jointly work to develop the Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI). These experts from around the globe aim to construct 1,000 cancer cell models. Read more on the launch of the initiative at the National Institutes of Health website.
  • The NIH recently announces $55 million in awards to launch the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program (PMI Cohort). This program is viewed as one of the most ambitious research endeavors in history.
  • Additionally, the NIH recently announced the largest study ever on breast cancer genetics in black women. The Breast Cancer Genetic Study in African-Ancestry Populations initiative does not involve new patient enrollment, but will examine data from 18 previous studies, resulting in a study population of 20,000 black women with breast cancer.
  • The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) released new consensus guidelines on the management of metastatic colorectal cancer. The guidelines were published in the Annals of Oncology.

 

MeSH – The Essential Difference Between #PubMed and Google

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PubMed and Google have much in common: 1) both are freely-available search interfaces that help people locate digital information on the Internet; 2) both were launched in the late 1990’s (PubMed in 1996 and Google in 1998), just as access to the World Wide Web was becoming more widely available; 3) and both are high-traffic tools on which millions of searches are performed daily.

But while PubMed averages about 3.5 million searches per day, Google handles about 2.3 million searches per minute. Because it has many valuable uses with its great breadth and wealth of information, Google has become essential to most in our world today.  But we must all beware to not become an “Homo unius machina inquirendi” (“person” of one search engine). Despite Google’s many efforts to replicate the PubMed experience for its users by creating and continuing to develop tools like Google Scholar, PubMed is still far superior when it comes to comprehensive searching of the life sciences/biomedical literature.

Here’s why:

PubMed was originally developed to provide free access to the MEDLINE database, which still makes up the primary component of PubMed. The MEDLINE database, first launched in its electronic format in the 1960s, now generally goes back as far as the 1940s in its online version, with the original print version (Index Medicus) going back as far as 1879. The most important and distinguishing feature of MEDLINE: its records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).  Google’s content is not – which is what makes these two search tools hugely different when it comes to the search results that they return on a topic. Continue reading →

Did You Know that Running Could Help Improve Your Memory?

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A new study published in Cell Metabolism has found that running releases a protein that is associated with improved memory in mice in laboratory conditions. This protein, called cathepsin B (CTSB), was known to help sore muscles recover and is secreted by muscle during exercise. The researchers found that adding CTSB to neurons in petri dishes led to brain cell production in mice. Furthermore, they showed a positive correlation between running and increased levels of the CTSB protein in mouse, monkey, and human subjects. Continue reading →