Fast Automated Biomedical Literature Extraction

FABLE (Fast Automated Biomedical Literature Extraction) mines the biomedical literature for information about human genes and proteins and provides features to download their bibliographic data freely in excel and other format. FABLE v3 allows a user to find articles mentioning a gene of interest (Article Finder), to generate a list of genes associated with one or more keywords (Gene Lister), or use a local mirror of the UCSC Genome Browser with a literature track (LitTrack).

e-Literature Searcher

e-LiSe (e-Literature Searcher) is an easy-to-use web-based application which finds biomedical information truly related to English words provided by the user. The program uses PubMed database of scientific abstracts as the source of data and a novel bio-linguistic statistical method (based on Z-score), to discover true correlations, even when they are low-frequency associations.

 

e-LiSe is also capable of finding names of researchers correlated to the information searched by the user. It can function as a name reference engine, answering questions like who is working on specified subject or what are the coworkers/collaborators of a certain person. For the latter the software uses the list of co-authors of each publication a researcher has written to display connections between scientists.

Semantic search of MedLine Database

The Medline.Cognition provides the alternative searching of Medline Database. Cognition’s Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) adds word and phrase meaning and understanding. It’s worth to try once.

 

Patent for generating oxygen in a process that mimics photosynthesis

A group of scientists from Battelle has earned a patent for generating oxygen in a process that mimics photosynthesis.

The technology creates oxygen and controls carbon dioxide using light energy and water without having to make electricity. The machine can operate on almost any light source — solar or other — to chemically duplicate what plants do when they absorb sunlight energy and convert it into useful chemicals.

Known by the United States Patent Office as No. 7,399,717, Oxygen Generation using Photolytically Driven Electrochemistry (PDEC) Platform Technology, the patent was granted earlier this year. It is one of several PDEC patents developed by Battelle.

Though commercial products based on this patent still are some years away from realization, PDEC is an important step forward to produce oxygen and trap carbon dioxide to maintain breathable air in confined spaces, such as on submarines, in space or high altitude flight, or in mine shafts that become blocked. In the case of an artificial lung, there is ample water in the blood from which a PDEC device could make oxygen.

To read the full article click here

Indian Patent Office Databases

Indian patent office provides the online patent searching.

·         Public Search for granted Patents: provides the patent no. search and provides full text of Indian Patents. This search has been categorized in following sections:

§   Public Search for Patents (No. 1 – 80000)

§   Public Search for Patents (No. 80001 to 1,53,697)

§   Public Search for Patents (No.1,53,698 to 1,69,500)

§   Public Search for Patents (New Records )

·          Patent Search for 18th Month Publications: provides the search facility for published patent application after 18 month and also for early publications.

·         Controller’s Decision for Search: provides the controller’s decision search.

The search features are very restricted, still we hope in coming days we will be having better options.

Key patent strategies for nanotechnology inventors

A very useful article has been published by Nanowerk Spotlight on patent strategies for nanotechnology inventors.  Following are the excerpts from the article

 At its simplest, a country’s patent system provides for the disclosure of information about inventions. To obtain a patent, an inventor must ‘teach’ the public how to make and use the invention in the best way the inventor knows. Thus, the patent system rewards only those inventors who are willing to share with the whole world by granting them exclusive ownership of their innovation. 

But complex technical and scientific issues means complex intellectual property (IP) issues. This especially is the case with nanotechnologies, which are not easy to classify (see: Nanotechnology and intellectual property issues). Taking the example of bionanotechnology and nanomedicine, the chapter “Patenting Inventions in Bionanotechnology: A Guide for Scientists and Lawyers” in the recent book Bionanotechnology: Global Prospects discusses the importance of securing valid and defensible patent protection for any player interested in bionanotechnology commercialization.   Read the full article 

First induced pluripotent stem cell patent – Kyoto University

Long debate is going on all over world for issuance of Patents on Stem Cells. Kyoto University has obtained a Japanese patent for a means to develop induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.  iPS cells have the potential to grow into any type of body tissue. It is the first time a patent has been granted anywhere in the world with regard to the cells, the university said, suggesting the school’s lead in patenting in the increasingly competitive and potentially lucrative field of regenerative medicine. (Source)

iPS cells are a type of pluripotent stem cell artificially derived from a non-pluripotent cell, typically an adult somatic cell, by inducing a “forced” expression of certain genes.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells are believed to be identical to natural pluripotent stem cells, such as embryonic stem cells in many respects, such as the expression of certain stem cell genes and proteins, chromatin methylation patterns, doubling time, embryoid body formation, teratoma formation, viable chimera formation, and potency and differentiability, but the full extent of their relation to natural pluripotent stem cells is still being assessed.