Global Health Care Statistics
Nutritional genomics is a science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health. It can be divided into two disciplines:
* Nutrigenomics: studies the effect of nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in physiology.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are post-transcriptional regulators that bind to complementary sequences in the three prime untranslated regions (3' UTRs) of target messenger RNA transcripts (mRNAs), usually resulting in gene silencing.[1][2] miRNAs are short ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, on average only 22 nucleotides long.
Actress Glenn Close has had her genome mapped by Illumina, one of the companies that is leading the race in whole-genome sequencing. This is not just empty celebrity gossip. Close says that she decided to take the test, which costs $48,000, to “move science forward.” I have no idea whether she personally paid for the test or Ilumina covered the cost for obvious reasons.
No matter who has paid for her personal test she made a great PR effort for the whole-Genome sequencing.
It took Christopher Columbus almost 5 weeks to reach the continent America. Today, you fly to New York in about 8 hours. The first commercial computer was about $1,550,000 and weighed somewhere around 13 tons.
How much did you spend for your cellphone, for your labtop ?
In 1918, only 1 in 13 US families owned a car. By 1929, 4 out of 5 families had one. In the same time period, the number of cars on the road increased from 8 million to 23 million.
Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?
In 1980s, if you finish your work on the kinetics of a particular enzyme you used to earn your Ph.D.
During early 90s complete analysis of a gene and associated pathways with western and southern techniques was a complete Ph.D. topic.
DNA is the blue print of the genetic information. Imagine, your genes are special text recipes for proteins. The taste of a dish is based on content of a recipe. Experienced gourmets can even judge a dish based on the recipe alone. As an analogy, it can be determined whether a protein is cancerous or not just based on the genetic blue print information on your DNA alone. DNA based diagnostics is much more reliable than the protein based diagnostics.
Avandia is an oral medication used to treat Type II diabetes. It is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline and was approved by the FDA. So far the diabetes drug has been used by over 6 million people worldwide, and could be responsible for thousands of heart attacks and deaths every year.
Functional SNP assessment.
Although the relationship between risk allele and causation is still in its infancy23, some phenotypic traits can possibly be inferred from the genome data (all functional SNPs discussed below are listed in Supplementary Table 14). We only included genotypes with a posterior probability above 99%.
Pharma, biotech and agriculture markets as well as academic institutions are craving for DNA sequence information as their future is depending on genome data in silico. Scientists understand the business side of the sector, and realize that outsourcing can be a pretty cost efficient way to get the data they need, rather than investing in the resources to perform the sequencing in their labs. In addition, outsourcing gives these institutions the ability to focus their efforts on their core competencies, usually drug discovery and development, instead of acquiring the tools for sequencing.
The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system (Source: Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences). Therefore, for the time being, and hopefully until the end of the Obama term United States is the best international model of a wealthy but under-performing health care system. The current USA health care statistics and the predictions for the next decade are of particular importance of showing what can be done in the developing nations on health care with ever growing GPDs.
