2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Informatics and Bioimaging: New Ways to Better Medicines

The discovery and development of effective medications with limited toxicities are rapidly changing. Recent advances in high-throughput genomic technologies, bioimaging methodologies, and mining of the enormous information on the internet have led to new ways to discover, develop, and evaluate medications. Innovation in the mining of data on drug response and toxicity from electronic medical records and social media has resulted in the identification of new drug targets and an appreciation of potentially harmful drug combinations. Bioimaging methods have greatly facilitated monitoring of drug target engagement in vivo and response to medications in a variety of diseases, most notably those affecting the central nervous system. Widespread use of internet search engines for drug-related questions is being leveraged to understand drug effectiveness and toxicity in diverse populations. The fields of drug development and translational medicine are poised to benefit immensely from the diverse experimental and clinical datasets focused on drug therapy. This shift in strategy provides the promise of optimizing drug use and a more rapid pathway to new medicines with improved safety and efficacy.