Making the microbiome accessible to millennials

Posted 6th April 2020 by Joshua Sewell

In 2017 Lisa and Alanna MacFarlane started The Gut Stuff to bring gut health science and nutritional information together for the millennial generation. We spoke to Lisa about educating consumers and marketing products in gut health.

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4 ways to ensure probiotic quality that matters

Posted 1st April 2020 by Joshua Sewell

Probiotics have been recommended for many conditions during the past century, ranging from long-term immunomodulatory effects to proven benefits in the management of chronic diseases. There is an increased availability of commercial products containing probiotic strains. Do all of them indeed provide health benefits for their consumers? I am convinced they don’t.

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Exploring the gut-brain axis in neurodevelopmental disorders

Posted 30th March 2020 by Joshua Sewell

In the last decade, research has well established (relatively speaking) the impact of gut microbiota on host physiology and behaviour. We know that the gut and the brain communicate bidirectionally. The gut-brain axis includes nerval, endocrine and immunologic pathways. What is less well established is whether alterations in gut microbial composition can affect brain structure and function in neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Augustine Therapeutics: Bridging the Valley of Death with VIB Discovery Sciences

Posted 27th March 2020 by Joshua Sewell

This article is republished with kind permission from BioVox.

Augustine Therapeutics is one of VIB’s latest spinoffs, developing a first-in-class drug for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. The company recently announced a seed-funding round of €4.2 million, led by V-Bio Ventures. We spoke to several of the key persons in Augustine about how the startup is tackling the “Valley of Death”: the no-man’s-land between academia and industry where many potential therapies often fail.

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Digital Pathology, Computational Biology, Organ Transplants, & the Future of Medicine

Posted 23rd March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Both transplant outcomes and lab methods have stagnated over the last 40 years. Ishita Moghe and Professor Kim Solez comment upon the rapidly changing landscape of medical research and the potential of digital pathology for transforming patient outcomes.

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Developing computationally derived imaging biomarkers for maximum clinical impact

Posted 16th March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Professor Anant Madabhushi is a world-recognised, award-winning leader in computerized imaging research and translational applications, with over 160 peer-reviewed journal publications and close to 100 patents issued or pending. He is a keynote speaker at the 6^th Digital Pathology & AI Congress: USA. He explains here why having patents is not enough…

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Culturing the uncultured: isolating human microbial ‘dark matter’

Posted 11th March 2020 by Joshua Sewell

A large fraction of the microorganisms that constitute the human microbiome have remained uncultured. Some of the uncultured microbes have close relatives that have been cultured. However, there are also whole groups of microbes that don’t have relatives in culture.

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Developing Deep Learning Models for Pathology Analysis

Posted 9th March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Ahead of the 6^th Digital Pathology & AI Congress: USA, Dr Saeed Hassanpour introduces us to the subject of his presentation: the opportunities and challenges in developing deep learning based tools for histology.

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The grass has never been greener for engineering plant immunity and resilience

Posted 18th March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Scientific research is always working at the frontiers of knowledge, but plant genomics technologies have had a dramatic impact on plant science even by our standards. The wide availability of sequencing technologies has been a rare step-change that has unlocked knowledge in a way nobody in the field could have imagined twenty years ago. Knowledge which could make a considerable contribution to food security in the face of changing climates.

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New Breeding Techniques: cloning major resistance genes in cereals

Posted 13th March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Advances in breeding techniques for cereal crops will be a focus at the 8^th Plant Genomics and Gene Editing Congress: USA. We asked Burleigh Dodds, an agricultural science publisher, to share an extract from one of their recent publications, ‘Advances in breeding techniques for cereal crops’.

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Plant biotech in Europe: Present and future

Posted 4th March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Marcel Kuntz is a panellist for the panel discussion on the regulatory landscape for plant biotechnology at the 8^th Plant Genomics & Gene Editing Congress: Europe. Here he provides us with some background for the discussion.

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Using genome editing technology within a systems biology approach to understand plant immunity

Posted 2nd March 2020 by Liv Sewell

Interested in systems biology, omics technology, and plant bioinformatics? Catch up with one of our speakers from the 8^th Plant Genomics and Gene Editing Congress: Europe, Professor Kristina Gruden…

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The case for biosynthesis: 5 problems with cannabinoids derived from plant cultivation

Posted 25th February 2020 by Joshua Sewell

As we look at the current and future market demands for cannabinoid ingredients, large consumer buyers are focused on purity, consistency and stability of supply. For a host of reasons, cannabinoid suppliers will find it extraordinarily difficult to meet this demand with plant-based production systems.

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Wild wheat, plant genomics, and food security

Posted 24th February 2020 by Liv Sewell

Wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world, providing 20% of the calories and proteins consumed by humankind. More than one fifth of the projected yield is lost every year to disease. Dr Brande Wulff, Group Leader at the John Innes Centre, and speaker at the 8^th Plant Genomics and Gene Editing Congress, Europe, is leading research aiming to reduce the proportion of wheat lost to pathogens and increase global food security…

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5 key requirements for unleashing innovation in the cannabis industry

Posted 21st February 2020 by Joshua Sewell

The cannabis industry faces a systemic problem where the legal nomenclature used to distinguish varietals of ​Cannabis Sativa is known to be unrelated to the genetic identity of the plant.¹ Cannabis plants being bought and sold under any specific trade name can be genetically unrelated and may not even have a shared cultivation history.

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Managing plant stress in the era of climate change: Realising global sustainable development goals

Posted 17th February 2020 by Liv Sewell

Dr Salme Timusk was the first to show that native soil bacteria have the ability to protect plants against drought conditions. Salme writes here about plant microbiome interaction studies: how they can facilitate plant health and contribute to solutions for climate change.

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Examining Blockchain Systems & Designing Smart Contracts

Posted 13th August 2018 by Jane Williams

The blockchain has the potential to enable the collaboration between patients, researchers, and care providers to provide individualised care for patients, but how can this technology be harnessed in a practical way?

This was one of the key questions that was asked at the Blockchain in Healthcare Congress and we had the pleasure of welcoming an array of expert speakers from pharma, academia, and industry to provide the answer.

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The role of extrinsic motivation in sports and physical activity

Posted 20th June 2018 by Jane Williams

Motivation is one of the most significant psychological concepts in many areas of life – from work and education to achieving personal goals. In sports and physical activity, motivation plays an especially important part due to the fact that, to millions of people worldwide, staying fit and active is not an obligation or a professional prerequisite, but rather a personal goal. Blockchain technology, together with elements of gamification, may actually help people achieve this goal.

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Conciliating Blockchain and GDPR

Posted 8th June 2018 by Jane Williams

Aurélie Bayle is a Data Protection Officer at be-ys: a role she considers to be at the heart of the new legal framework for any company.

Before GDPR came into effect on 25^th May 2018, she was working towards global compliance, which involved completing all the steps given by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, an advisory board made up of a representative from the data authority of each EU Member State, the European Data Protection Supervisor, and the European Commission. Her duties have included auditing the structures and processes, preparing the data protection impact assessments, checking the compliance of processing activities, analysing the risks of the processing in the medical area, preparing new processes and policies about data protection, and asking data processors about their own compliance.

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When Blockchain Meets the Right to be Forgotten: Technology Versus Law

Posted 2nd May 2018 by Jane Williams

Over the past few years, the popularity of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies has increased and has reached important notoriety, not only in scientific and IT journals, but also in the media. Although there are many kinds of cryptocurrencies in circulation nowadays, the most popular is Bitcoin.

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Supporting Blockchain Startups: An Open Letter from Katherine Merton

Posted 27th April 2018 by Jane Williams

Dear colleagues,

The blockchain technology market is expected to grow to 2.3 billion US dollars by 2021, from 339.5 million US dollars in 2017. [1] With an annual growth rate of 61.5%, it is one of the fastest growing technologies in the healthcare industry.

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The Big List of Microfluidics Companies & Investors

Posted 25th April 2018 by Jane Williams

The microfluidic-based devices market has been growing since 2014 due to the increasing point of care testing demand and the miniaturisation of microfluidic chips. 

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What will we do with all this data?

Posted 16th April 2018 by Jane Williams

The amount of data we are creating every day has increased exponentially to match the rise in use of smart and connected devices. The internet of things has connected every aspect of our lives to the digital realm: most of these devices operate by tracking your habits, movements, preferences, voice, and more, then logging those habits online. Specifically, the collection of health data has become abundant, because most people now have or wear some sort of device to track daily patterns, steps, cycles, and more. Even our phones often default to track these things for us, whether we choose to enable the function or not.

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How Standards & Standardised Infrastructure Fuel Innovation

Posted 4th April 2018 by Jane Williams

It might surprise a lot of people to learn that standards can be viewed as a tool to support innovation, to set businesses free and to focus on the core of their product where their expertise lie. When working with the use of electronic communication systems within the entire healthcare sector, the main focal point is often ensuring a good support for collaboration and work processes.

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