Kevin Garwood on LinkedIn: Anonymization of whole slide images in histopathology for research and… (2024)

Could locally-sourced natural gas and mammoth ivory become future commodities for permafrost communities? I came across this really interesting PBS documentary on Arctic sink holes and wondered how people living in the melting permafrost areas will adapt to climate change. The piece really made me pause for thought.As the permafrost melts and the decay of frozen organic matter accelerates, methane production is increasing. At one point in the video, you see a lake bubbling with methane. It made me think: 'Why fuss about sticking a drill into the ground for oil when you could stick a straw into a lake or mud and get natural gas?'I wonder if our views on certain commodities will change. There is a general interest in trying to reduce how much carbon-fuels we use but if large amounts of methane are escaping into the air, wouldn't it make sense to capture it? Perhaps new technology will be developed which would allow local communities to collect and concentrate methane run-off into fuel pods they could use to provide their own fuel or sell it onwards to get an income. In areas like Canada, the long sought-after Northwest Passage can now be navigated. Perhaps natural gas could be loaded onto ships and feed markets in ways that would decrease a need to dig for coal.If the ground thaws and thousands of years of animal remains appear, would it not make sense to encourage communities to gather, carve and export mammoth ivory? Would encouraging that market in permafrost communities reduce the interest in getting ivory from living elephants?Finally I wonder if governments in permafrost areas could help train locals living in permafrost areas in paleontology, to help encourage new sources of income like paleo-tourism? When the video shows the damage sink holes are doing to inhabited areas and I hear of the changes in food supplies, I do wonder how communities which have been there for generations are going to make a living.#arctic #climatechange #sinkholes #permafrost

1

1 Comment

I found a really good animation video that explains what G-protein coupled receptors are and how they act in the body. From the video: "GPCRs are the largest and single-most important family of drug targets in the human body. 25 to 30% of current drugs target GPCRs including many of the best-selling drugs".GPCRs are features that do not just appear in humans. The most popular model organisms used to understand the signaling logic in GPCRs are Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Danio rerio, and the mouse." (From Langenhan's "Model Organisms in G Protein-Coupled Receptor Research").#gpcr #animation #drugdiscovery #pharma

1

Cool course - try to register before September 3. The World Intellectual Property Organisation is putting on a course that I've already taken but wanted to share with any of my contacts. It's "Executive Course on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources in Life Sciences (DL-427)" and I really enjoyed it. I remember doing the course and getting into neat things like trying to imagine I was running a biobank. And I became very interested in researching how certain types of plants could be used in bioremediation to sequester arsenic in countries that have problems with arsenic with drinking water. I think that came up when we were encouraged to look at patent searches on topics that interested us. I used the course as an excuse to look at biotech applications beyond medicine and look at pollution.I highly recommend it and I didn't feel I needed a lot of previous experience to understand it. The course materials in WIPO courses are quite good and you get a certificate if you pass their exam.#wipo #genetics #resources #iphttps://lnkd.in/ePEP4CPs

2

I think the idea of having a standardised taxonomy of terms describing allowable data uses for data sets is a good idea. Consider an organisation that has been building up a data catalogue of all its data assets. It isn't enough that a data asset is discoverable by most of the staff - its associated restrictions of use need to be available to people as well so they can make informed decisions.Just imagine...you're celebrating a new data platform that provides that democratic data access that your data strategy has been promoting. Now imagine it if a team identifies data sets to use. They start knitting together data sets to produce some novel data product - and then the team finds out much later that there is some kind of data use restriction it didn't know about. It could make the project grind to a halt.Communicating this kind of information to staff is important and undoubtedly organisations try their best to promote that dialogue between data users and people who understand its governance conditions. But as a data repository grows, it's useful to have a standard way of describing data access use cases. Not having to invent such a taxonomy from scratch is also a good thing.The Data Use Ontology sounds interesting. According to this paper: "DUO is a hierarchical vocabulary of human and machine-readable data use terms that consistently and unambiguously represents a dataset’s allowable data uses. DUO has been implemented by major international stakeholders such as the Broad and Sanger Institutes and is currently used in annotation of over 200,000 datasets worldwide. Using DUO in data management and access facilitates researchers’ discovery and access of relevant datasets. DUO annotations increase the FAIRness of datasets and support data linkages using common data use profiles when integrating the data for secondary analyses."#fair #datagovernance #ontology #datastrategy #biomedical

9

An interesting comparison between the GDPR and Australia's Data Privacy Act. https://lnkd.in/eBm5NT3H.#gdpr #australia #dataprotection

3

3 Comments

I often look at trial descriptions from Clinical Trials dot Gov in the US. But there are other very useful ones as well, such as the clinical trial registry maintained for Australia and New Zealand. What would be really cool is if they provided a web service but perhaps that will come in the future. Enjoy!#clinicaltrials #australia #newzealand

3

For any of my contacts in or near London who are interested in life sciences or generative AI, just a reminder that this meetup event is happening tonight at 18:00 in the Kings Cross area. Dr. Nikolay Burlutskiy will be giving a keynote presentation on "Generative AI for Drug Discovery and Development".#precisionmedicine #drugdiscovery #genaihttps://lnkd.in/erVHKjiw

4

Part of data management can involve appreciating the digital shadow of data assets as they relate to IP management. IP management can become a bit complicated for organisations that have been formed through multiple merger-acquisition events. In general, I think any data strategy that promises to democratise access to data assets is presumes there is a coherent inventory of those assets.I thought this article published by the American Bar Association on "Intellectual Property Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions" is interesting. This is aimed at IP lawyers, but remember they have to capture bits of data to support these activities and ultimately that has to be managed somehow.#datamanagement #ipmanagement #mergeracquisitionshttps://lnkd.in/e2XgFmM7

1

Why are so many major pharmaceutical companies found along the Rhine? Drug hunter Dr. Donald Kirsch once asked this during a car ride he took after a business meeting with a pharmaceutical company. The answer has to do with Germany's 19th century dominance in synthetic dyes used to make colour. Enjoy Kirsch's book "The Drug Hunters", especially Chapter 4.In the area of art history I've been very interested in the history of pigments and dyes. I've just finished a research essay about it for an art history project at Birkbeck. Over the past few years for work, I've mainly been involved with working in some aspect of drug development processes. I've recently spent many evenings trying to research the histories of pigments and dyes, and many days researching new topics in data management for drug discovery and clinical trials. I did not intend that my interests in colourants and drugs would overlap, but it turns out these two fields of knowledge are not as distant as I once thought.In 1856, William Henry Perkin discovered analine purple, the world's first synthetic dye. I've been reading a lot about synthetic colourants (especially blue pigments) and I briefly came across descriptions of his early work. Synthetic dyes changes everything in fashion and textiles.The dyes meant most people in society could wear vivid colours, not just the wealthy.Although the first of the synthetic dyes was discovered in London, Germany became the dominant powerhouse for manufacturing them. For example, by 1913, Germany was exporting 135,000 tons of synthetic dye whereas the UK was exporting 5,000 tons. Germany had a strong set of institutions and scientists and the country became the dominant power in synthetic chemistry. Many dye factories were set up on the Rhine to transport their dyes to Europe and the rest of the world.By the late 1800s, dye companies along the Rhine were churning out many different colours. One company, Bayer, was using a model of research that would involve tweeking a known compound that produced one colour to make a new compound that created another colour.Increasingly, Bayer wanted to find new applications of synthetic chemistry that would create profitable product lines. In 1888, Carl Duisberg established the Bayer Pharmaceutical Research Group to invent new medicines.Duisberg applied the same tweeking approach to salicylic acid. His researchers tweeked the salicylic compound in order to retain its anti-inflammatory properties but reduce side effects such as nausea and gastric irritation. Eventually Bayer created Aspirin.So there you have it: the advent of Aspirin was partly made possible by a public that was very keen to use new kinds of colour!https://lnkd.in/e_H2Rbe8#drugdiscovery #arthistory #syntheticchemistry #analine #clinicaltrials

3