Digital Pharma: Online clinical collaboration

A new online educational resource will offer researchers across the medical community access to peer-reviewed information on biomarkers.

The portal has been developed by Swiss pharma company Roche in collaboration with the American College of Cardiology and the partners say it will offer doctors access to a unique resource.

"We are breaking new ground with this collaborative project," said James Creeden, chief medical officer of Roche Diagnostics. "The goal is to address a need in the medical community for information about biomarkers that is both clinically relevant and scientifically fair and balanced.

“We are excited about this innovative resource because we believe it will give clinicians the independent information they need to practice evidence-based medicine and improve patient care."

Roche Diagnostics provide support for the ACC to create a unique educational programme, which will be available at CardioSource.com, the College’s online clinical cardiovascular information resource.

It will start off with collections of case studies and peer-reviewed journal articles, but there are plans to make it a more interactive resource in the future.

These will see the development of forums for practicing physicians to connect with experts in the field and gain knowledge that can be immediately transferred into clinical practice.

“This is a very exciting partnership that we hope will serve as a model for collaboration between non-profit medical societies and industry,” said Dr Jack Lewin, chief executive of the ACC. “I know of no other resource where physicians can access the latest information about biomarkers and apply them to clinical practice in real time.  This collaboration will be a great leap forward in quality improvement.”

Open access proteomic research portal

Meanwhile, researchers at Germany’s Heidelberg University have set up an open access web portal to aid proteomic research through the exploration of epitopes.

These are a portion of a molecule to which an antibody binds and are often used in proteomics and the study of other gene products.

The Epitope Choice Resource, or EpiC for short, allows users to design virtual experiments to determine how many antibodies they need to make and where to target the epitopes. It also links to a range of bioinformatic tools.

Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.