Are the Pieces Starting to Come Together for Management of Desmoid Tumors?

Desmoid tumor research is changing how desmoid tumors are managed with the prospective documentation that growing desmoid tumors spontaneously regress one third of the time. Patient partnership through the Desmoid Research Tumor Foundation and academia is leading to rapid advancement in desmoid tumor biology understanding and treatment. See related articles by Colombo et al.

Responsible, practical genomic data sharing that accelerates research.

Data sharing anchors reproducible science, but expectations and best practices are often nebulous. Communities of funders, researchers and publishers continue to grapple with what should be required or encouraged. To illuminate the rationales for sharing data, the technical challenges and the social and cultural challenges, we consider the stakeholders in the scientific enterprise.

Recent Advances and Emerging Applications in Text and Data Mining for Biomedical Discovery.

Precision medicine will revolutionize the way we treat and prevent disease. A major barrier to the implementation of precision medicine that clinicians and translational scientists face is understanding the underlying mechanisms of disease. We are starting to address this challenge through automatic approaches for information extraction, representation and analysis.

Adapting bioinformatics curricula for big data.

Modern technologies are capable of generating enormous amounts of data that measure complex biological systems. Computational biologists and bioinformatics scientists are increasingly being asked to use these data to reveal key systems-level properties. We review the extent to which curricula are changing in the era of big data.

Training the next generation of quantitative biologists in the era of big data.

The following sections are included: Workshop Focus, Workshop Contributions and References.

Building the next generation of quantitative biologists.

Many colleges and universities across the globe now offer bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, along with certificate programs in bioinformatics. While there is some consensus surrounding curricula competencies, programs vary greatly in their core foci, with some leaning heavily toward the biological sciences and others toward quantitative areas. This allows prospective students to choose a program that best fits their interests and career goals.

Poly(Acrylic Acid-b-Styrene) Amphiphilic Multiblock Copolymers as Building Blocks for the Assembly of Discrete Nanoparticles.

In order to expand the utility of current polymeric micellar systems, we have developed amphiphilic multiblock copolymers containing alternating blocks of poly(acrylic acid) and poly(styrene). Heterotelechelic poly(tert-butyl acrylate-b-styrene) diblock copolymers containing an α-alkyne and an ω-azide were synthesized by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), allowing control over the molecular weight while maintaining narrow polydispersity indices. The multiblock copolymers were constructed by copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition of azide-alkyne end functional diblock copolymers which were then characterized by (1)H NMR, FT-IR and SEC.