Curators' Favorite Papers

Electronic medical record-integrated pharmacogenomics and related clinical decision support concepts
Authors: Caraballo PJ Bielinski SJ St Sauver JL Weinshilboum RM

The authors of this article from Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, discuss the challenges to successful integration of pharmacogenetic/pharmacogenomic (PGx) clinical decision support (CDS) tools into electronic health and medical records (EMR). They provide examples of medical systems that have already done so and they specifically highlight the success of the Mayo Clinic where CDS tools for eleven PGx genes and nineteen drug-gene interactions have been successfully integrated into EMRs and patient care.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28390138


Celebrating parasites
Authors: Greene CS, Garmire LX, Gilbert JA, Ritchie MD, Hunter LE.

This correspondence to Nature Genetics is a response to a controversial 2016 editorial from the the New England Journal of Medicine in which the term, “research parasites” was coined. The term described those researchers who do secondary analyses of data generated by other researchers. The authors argue that “parasites” serve an important purpose in research and that the critical re-analysis of data is crucial for the practice of science. To honor such research, they announce two inaugural award categories at this year's Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing: the Junior Parasite Award and the Sustained Parasite Award.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358134