Genoomika ja siirdemeditsiini tippkeskuse külalisseminar 6. detsembril 2016 Dr. Pauline Crystal Ng, Singapuri Genoomiinstituut

Abstract:  My goal is to make science accessible to new audiences. I use bioinformatics to bridge the gap between science and users. For example, 15 years ago, I created SIFT, an algorithm to bridge computational biology and human genetics. Recently, we extended SIFT for agricultural applications.

Another area where science accessibility is important is the consumer. 80% of Internet users search for a health-related topic online. We asked whether online data is valid, especially drug reviews? We survey over 100,000 WebMD drug reviews and find that consumer reviews agree with scientific literature and FDA labels. Consumers also identified new issues such as better drug delivery, and an alternative medicine that would be suitable for FDA approval.          

Another concern is ~25% of people searching for health information online hit a paywall. Medical knowledge is locked up in non-open access scientific research papers which have copyright licenses that prevent free distribution. However, facts cannot be copyrighted. FactPub is a framework that distributes facts, not full-texts. People with access to papers can locally run our fact extraction software and send the facts to our public server factpub.org for everyone to access. This fact-publishing framework will empower accessibility to health and other scientific research. More information from the Genome Institute of Singapore web