Recent Patents in Bioinformatics, April — May 2011
US Patent 7,945,392. Methods and systems for drug screening and computational modeling based on biologically realistic neurons. Inventors: Peter Siekmeier, Steven Matthysse. Assignee: McLean Hospital Corporation.
The patent describes a method for screening a test drug for potential efficacy in treating schizophrenia. The abstract states that the approach includes "a computer model" that represents "a volume of disease-afflicted neural tissue comprising biologically realistic neurons" that are exposed to the potential drug for a period of time. The outcome of the exposure indicates whether the drug is a likely candidate for treating the disease.
US Patent 7,945,389. Information processing system using nucleotide sequence-related information. Inventors: Takamasa Kato, Takeo Morimoto. Assignee: Hitachi.
Describes a method for processing information on nucleotide sequences. The system will provide positional information on nucleotide sequences as well as associated semantic information.
US Patent 7,941,278. MicroRNA motifs. Inventors: Yu-Ching Chang, Yu-Yu Lin, Shiu-Chieh Lan, Cheng-Tao Wu, Chung-Cheng Liu. Assignee: Industrial Technology Research Institute.
The patent describes the development of computational methods for predicting microRNA motifs for a target gene or a set of target genes.