Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS)

CSHALS is the premier annual event focused on the use of semantic technologies in the pharmaceutical industry, including hospitals/healthcare institutions and academic research labs.

Rather than a Semantic Web conference, CSHALS focuses on specific applications of semantic technologies. Attendees will gain a better understanding of where the field is headed and be prepared to advance with the field.


Themes of past CSHALS conferences:

• Clinical Information Management

• Discovery Information Integration

• Integrated Healthcare and Semantics in Electronic Health Records

• Translational Medicine / Safety

• Search and Document Management/Business Intelligence/Text Mining

• Text Mining/ Information Extraction

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Pfizer Postdoctoral Program in Neuroscience

Pfizer Neuroscience Postdoctoral

Fellowship Program www.pfizerneuroscience.com Based in scenic
Groton, Connecticut, the Pfizer Neuroscience Fellowship Program provides an
unparalled opportunity for young scientists interested in understanding
brain disorders and translating knowledge into innovative medicines. We
seek motivated and enthusiastic individuals with a demonstrated track record
in basic or translational neuroscience interested in pursuing an
academic-style postdoc in an industry setting. Successful candidates will
come from a range of backgrounds including molecular/cellular biology,
protein biochemistry, in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology, imaging,
systems neuroscience, animal models, and behavioral/cognitive neuroscience.

At Pfizer, there are extensive programs in molecular/cellular neuroscience,
synapse biology, and pharmacology. Moreover, there is a vibrant in vivo
electrophysiology program for cognition, extensive behavioral models,
imaging platforms, and essentially limitless access to chemical biology and
animal models. In addition, postdocs at Pfizer get exposed to the art and
science of drug discovery, with first hand ability to interact with programs
working to develop new medicines.
 

Applications are accepted throughout the year with reviews and interviews occurring in the fall and spring. For the fall review, applications are due October 1st and interviews will be conducted early in November. Candidates will be contacted by October 15th if they have been selected for an interview. The application deadline for the spring review will be April 1st and interviews will be scheduled in May. Interested candidates should apply at the link below, making sure to submit a resume and a summary of research interests (2-3 pages in length). In addition, please have three letters of recommendation emailed directly to Kate Yannacci at kate.m.yannacci@pfizer.com. Details on the Pfizer Neuroscience Postdoctoral Program can be found at www.pfizerneuroscience.com.


Apply to the postdoc program:
Applications are reviewed on a regular basis and top candidates are invited to visit, present their research, and interview at Pfizer's Groton Research Campus. More extended descriptions of the interview process will be provided to the invited candidates at the time of invitation.


Apply Now

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XTractor Premium surpasses 200,000 mark of Expert Annotated PubMed Facts

Indian Life Sciences Informatics Company, Molecular Connections announced today, that their XTractor Premium platform surpasses 200,000 "Expert" annotated facts from PubMed.

XTractor Premium – is a platform for discovery, analysis and modeling of published biomedical facts. The application also comes with - XTractor Premium Knowledgebase - the only knowledgebase, which provides "Expert" annotated facts from PubMed on a daily basis. The XTractor Premium Knowledgebase now has more than 202,847 relationships on proteins, drugs, biological process and diseases and is ever growing with more than 600 relationships being added every single day. XTractor provides manually categorized updates on the latest published facts from PubMed for more than 20 categories which include : Biomarkers, clinical trials, dosage, pathways, toxicology, RNAi studies, mutations, knockouts, diseases mechanisms, protein- drug relationships and much more.

Expert Annotated Facts make XTractor Premium a High Quality Knowledgebase and the vast coverage of all biological entities wrapped with in intuitive and analytical software allows researchers more time for science and eliminates the need to consult BioIT experts.

The entities are out linked to over 30 different public databases such as patent databases, wikipedia, clinical trials, and other protein/drug databases.

With XTractor Premium one can,

· Quickly access relevant, high quality expert annotated biomedical facts

· Understand multiple target preferences for a specific drug

· Track common gene polymorphisms across multiple diseases

· Understand Pharmacologic actions, protein interactions and toxicity studies of drugs

And for more, please visit the case study section.

About XTractor Premium

The Knowledgebase: XTractor knowledgebase currently contains 202,847 relationships on biomarkers, clinical trials, pathways, knockout studies, mutations, drug interactions, toxicity, pharmacokinetics, disease mechanisms. It is the Only Knowledgebase that gets updated everyday with manually annotated relationships from the latest PubMed publications and contains more than 856 Unique Drugs, 2569 Unique Diseases, 9286 Unique Proteins, and 2102 Unique Biological Processes. Hence in no time one gets to access one of the largest and the most current manually annotated datasets across the world.

To know more about the advantages of the XTractor Premium and to register for a free trial account and a webex demo please visit XTractor Premium portal www.xtractor.in/premium.

XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery, knowledge sharing, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts.

• The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis
  
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• Only Knowledgebase with daily updations from PubMed
  
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The future of biocuration

Blogging about curation in the past several issues have been discussed but here is something very critical.

To thrive, the field that links biologists and their data urgently needs structure, recognition and support.

Biocuration, the activity of organizing, representing and making biological information accessible to both humans and computers, has become an essential part of biological discovery and biomedical research. But curation increasingly lags behind data generation in funding, development and recognition.

Three urgent actions to advance this key field. First, authors, journals and curators should immediately begin to work together to facilitate the exchange of data between journal publications and databases. Second, in the next five years, curators, researchers and university administrations should develop an accepted recognition structure to facilitate community-based curation efforts. Third, curators, researchers, academic institutions and funding agencies should, in the next ten years, increase the visibility and support of scientific curation as a professional career.

Failure to address these three issues will cause the available curated data to lag farther behind current biological knowledge. Researchers will observe an increasing occurrence of obvious gaps in knowledge. As these gaps expand, resources will become less effective for generating and testing hypotheses, and the usefulness of curated data will be seriously compromised. When all the data produced or published are curated to a high standard and made accessible as soon as they become available, biological research will be conducted in a manner that is quite unlike the way it is done now.

Researchers will be able to process massive amounts of complex data much more quickly. They will garner insight about the areas of their interest rapidly with the help of inference programs. Digesting information and generating hypotheses at the computer screen will be so much faster that researchers will get back to the bench quickly for more experiments. Experiments will be designed with more insight; this increased specificity will cause an exponential growth in knowledge, much as we are experiencing exponential growth in data today.

Also read this

Do you want to know more?

Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.

Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.

Productivity tools-Simulation Software Selected as Application of Choice by Premier Pharmaceutical Company

A leading provider of software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, today announced that the pharmacokinetics, dynamics, and metabolism science board at a top three pharmaceutical company named its software an "application of choice."

As pharmaceutical companies face a significant number of patent expirations in the near future, there is a need to become more aggressive in research and development to fill the pipeline, sometimes with reduced R&D staff.

Productivity tools in the field of pharmacokinectics, ADMET, chemical data visualization and analysis, etc. that leverage the expertise of the industry's scientific teams. It is believed that the difficulties facing some parts of the pharmaceutical industry will result in greater use of such tools as managers realize that the savings in time and money that can be achieved through their application vastly exceeds the cost of obtaining and learning to use them.