Guest commentary (2) on chapter 10: Accompanying commentary on ‘challenges and opportunities of bioinformatics in disease biomarker discovery’
Introduction
At no time in human history has there been a better opportunity to understand the basis of disease and offer remediation to the patient. The last 50 years of growth in biotechnology have provided us with an amazing understanding of the cell, the onset of disease, and patient monitoring, all enabling rapid decisions about proper healthcare. Microarrays are commonplace, measuring the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. New and innovative technologies allow us to monitor the growth of cells in continuous fashion, and technology will soon arrive that allows us to sequence complete human genomes for <$1000. These and other methods drastically increase our capability to explore and examine the processes that lead to disease, and help us map systems biology. However, these same approaches also generate terabytes or petabytes of data with each experiment, each with large dimensions of concern. Thus, it becomes ever more important that along with these new technologies, we also seek to develop new methods of data interpretation to assist with proper data mining and decision making. Nowhere is this more true than with translational medicine, given that biological systems are inherently nonlinear, continuous, and dynamic.
Biocyberinfrastructure
In light of this ...
