Machine Learning for Patient Forecasting and Site Selection

Current diagnostic methods for lower respiratory specimens typically take one to two days to identify most bacterial pathogens. During that time, clinicians must rely on guideline recommendations and clinical diagnosis to guide empiric therapy, which is not optimized based on the patient’s individual pathogen. The BioFire Pneumonia Panel will provide pathogen identification in a much shorter timeframe and may allow clinicians to optimize targeted pathogen-specific therapy sooner. The BioFire Pneumonia Panel is a rapid multiplex-PCR test that identifies 33 targets, including 18 bacteria, 8 viruses and 7 antimicrobial resistance genes from lower respiratory tract specimens in about an hour. It provides semi-quantitative results (in copies/ml) for 15 of the bacterial targets. This new feature provided by multiplex-PCR testing may help clinicians and laboratorians separate colonizing from pathogenic levels of bacteria.

Listen in as Dr Jeremy Day, of the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, discusses his work exploring non-coding RNA species regulation of DNA methylation in neuronal system- including a review of some of his lab's latest unpublished data.

The cost of returned medicines is estimated to be between $5-10 billion per year in the US alone. However, pharmaceutical companies are struggling to streamline the data flow and verification of returned saleable goods.

Optimizing the receptor binding kinetics of new drugs can have significant benefits, ranging from improved duration of action to enhanced efficacy through the insurmountable antagonism of dynamic physiological systems.