Drug discovery uses the major amount of its resources for the high throughput screening. Based on specific probabilistic calculation, large experiments in HTS are performed by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to identify some molecules that could become drug after further long analyses.

Recent studies published this week on Nature journal demonstrated that sperm can link up with other cells in order to swim faster and successfully reach the egg. Surprisingly, scientists from Harvard University noted that sperm form clusters only with cells of relatives.

Synthetic biology is a modern discipline that tries to manipulate cells and program them to perform some activities useful for us. Different products or services may be provided by cells, for instance production of biofuel or toxin identification into a body as well as controlled insulin release. Synthetic biology requires a strict control of the system, but many parts involved into the process have not been known yet.

A common English quote says that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. This sentence was wrongly attributed to Disraeli, whereas it was firstly published by Marc Twain. Even if it could seem true, statistics is the only tool available up to date to manage a large amount of data and to give their a mean. Several functions are usually used in statistical analysis; the most common are the average, standard deviation, frequency and also the number of observation is reported in scientific publications.

The pediatric knowledge base (PKB) is an IT system developed at the Pediatric Pharmacology Unit of the Children’s Philadelphia Hospital. This project involved professionals from several disciplines, such as medicine, pharmacology, statistics, bioinformatics. They built a model in which clinical data from patient were combined with electronic medical records and drug profiling, in order to obtain an IT tool able to continuously learn information about the patients self.

Several immune diseases seriously compromise life quality of patients and cause important deficit in general body functions. One common autoimmune disease is the Insulin Deficient Diabetes Mellitus (namely IDDM) which arises during childhood and often correlates with autoimmune response versus pancreatic islets. Transplantation is the best treatment for this kind of disease, but is possible only in presence of a compatible allotype and also in this case the possibility to have a rejection is quite high.

Tuberculosis is one of the diseases eliminated from occidental countries, even if few cases are reported every year. Granuloma formation into lung is the fundamental characteristics of this disease and the involvement of our immune system in this process is argued since long time.

The broad diffusion of technologies such as computers, databases, mobile phones and so on, has determined a considerable change in our life. We usually use this kind of instruments at the work or school, at home and in other situations of everyday life.

Survival of motor neuron centromeric (SMN) genes are involved in spinal muscular atrophy when mutated. This disease is an autosomal recessive disorder that progressively determines the loss of spinal alpha motor neurons, causing death during the childhood.

Christmas is one of the most magic moment during the year and New Year’s Eve is really exciting. Nevertheless, some studies reported in literature demonstrated a correlation between heart attack and winter holiday. It could sound strange because stressor elements that have an important role in heart failure should not be present during holiday.