Discovering New Cures for Age Old Diseases

Cancer has been a problem humans have been dealing with for ages, and it’s a continual thorn in our collective side. It’s a disease with a high mortality rate, and we understand a lot about what it does but not how to stop that process. While medical science works hard on cracking that puzzle, we’ve made progress on other diseases that have been problems for ages.

Understanding Disease

HPLC purification is a crucial process in forensic science, telling us more about how a disease has affected someone on a molecular level. We can use this process to test reactions of potentially harmful toxins, in order to isolate exactly how a disease affects the body. Once the reaction is observed, and repeated, it becomes something scientists can test for.

Understanding what a disease does is the first step in curing, killing or deactivating it.

How Cures Work

Going deeper, we can even use these synthetic strands to test for the presence of something. Phosphorothioate oligonucleotides, for instance, are “anti-sense” particles used in genetic therapy. These drugs basically deactivate whatever strand of DNA would otherwise cause the harmful genetic disorder to crop up.

We can also test for these chemicals and toxins in real-time, which means a diagnosis is much faster than it was even ten or twenty years ago. That’s made a significant difference in response times and diagnoses for patients in places like Africa, a region beset with malaria outbreaks. Testing has sped up results and that means doctors have more time to prescribe life saving medication to patients. The costs are also lower, so testing is feasible in poorer nations.


 

Bio: The Midland Certified Reagent Company can manufacture phosphorotioate oligonucleotides, as well as purification modalities used in a variety of testing processes.

Clean Out Your Inbox to Increase Productivity

Posted by: Phin Upham

In a recent blog post, Financial Times columnist Tim Harford quoted efficiency expert Merlin Mann, who says that there are only five things that a person can do after reading an email: delete it, reply to it, take action yourself, delegate actions to someone else or hold off on taking any actions. Because of this, Harford recommends moving all emails out of the Inbox as soon as they are read. They can either be deleted or moved into a “To Do” folder that has tasks that need to be completed.

The reason for doing this is more than just cosmetic. According to Harford, leaving old emails in your Inbox essentially turns it into your To Do list; this means that anyone who sends you an email effectively puts an additional item in your To Do list as well. Cleaning up the Inbox relieves this pressure and allows you to control your list of action items.

Read the full blog post at: http://timharford.com/2013/09/3180/
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Phin Upham is an investor from NYC and SF. You may contact Phin on his Phin Upham website or Facebook page.