Health and Medicine

When, in late 2011, it became public knowledge that two research groups had submitted for publication manuscripts that reported on their work on mammalian transmissibility of a lethal H5N1 avian influenza strain, the information caused an international debate about the ...

Pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers, and government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health all possess large quantities of clinical research data. If these data were shared more widely within and across sectors, the ...

There is growing recognition that the United States' clinical trials enterprise (CTE) faces great challenges. There is a gap between what is desired - where medical care is provided solely based on high quality evidence - and the reality - ...

Health systems and assets are a large part of the critical infrastructure of any community and are vital not only for the safety and well-being of its citizens, but also for the economic vitality, quality of life, and livelihood of ...

An ideal health care system relies on efficiently generating timely, accurate evidence to deliver on its promise of diminishing the divide between clinical practice and research. There are growing indications, however, that the current health care system and the clinical ...

With the advent of genome-wide association studies, numerous associations between specific gene loci and complex diseases have been identified--for breast cancer, coronary artery disease, and asthma, for example. This rapidly advancing field of genomics has stirred great interest in "personalized" ...

New discoveries in genomics--that is, the study of the entire human genome--are changing how we diagnose and treat diseases. As the trend shifts from genetic testing largely being undertaken for rare genetic disorders to, increasingly, individuals being screened for common ...

Neuroscience has made phenomenal advances over the past 50 years and the pace of discovery continues to accelerate. On June 25, 2008, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders hosted more than 70 of the ...

Until fairly recently, genetic information was used primarily in the diagnosis of relatively rare genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s Disease, but a transformation in the use of genetic and genomic information is underway. While many predictions ...

Nearly 20 million nuclear medicine procedures are carried out each year in the United States alone to diagnose and treat cancers, cardiovascular disease, and certain neurological disorders. Many of the advancements in nuclear medicine have been the result of research ...