Project Baseline Aims to Ward Off Illness Before We Get Sick | The New York Times
Project Baseline is a large study that seeks to better understand the transition from normal health to disease. The study could lead to the identification of new markers in the blood, stool or urine of healthy people that help predict cancer, cardiovascular disease and other leading killers of Americans. It is a joint effort between Stanford and Duke Universities and Verily, a life sciences company owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Researchers are recruiting 10,000 adults across the United States who will be examined in extreme detail and followed intensively for at least four years.
Predicting B cell receptor substitution profiles using public repertoire data | PLOS Computational Biology
Antibody engineering can be greatly informed by knowledge about the underlying affinity maturation process. As such this can be probed by sequencing, but unfortunately, in practice often only one member of the clonal family is sequenced, making it difficult to determine a set of possible amino acid mutations that would retain the original antibody antigen binding affinity. Researchers overcome this data sparsity by developing a statistical learning approach that leverages vast information about amino acid preferences available in public immune system repertoire data. They use a penalized regression approach to devise a flexible statistical model that integrates multiple sources of information into a coherent prediction framework and validate their prediction algorithm using subsampling and held out data.
The smartphone app that can tell you’re depressed before you know it yourself | MIT Technology Review
There are about 45 million people in the US alone with a mental illness, and those illnesses and their courses of treatment can vary tremendously. But there is something most of those people have in common: a smartphone. A startup founded in Palo Alto, California, by a trio of doctors, including the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, is trying to prove that our obsession with the technology in our pockets can help treat some of today’s most intractable medical problems: depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse. Analyzing the way we type and scroll can reveal as much as a psychological test.