Introduction to the special section on BioGrid: biomedical computations on the grid

Synthetic genetic targeting of genome instability in cancer

Cancer is a leading cause of death throughout the World. A limitation of many current chemotherapeutic approaches is that their cytotoxic effects are not restricted to cancer cells, and adverse side effects can occur within normal tissues. Consequently, novel strategies are urgently needed to better target cancer cells. As we approach the era of personalized medicine, targeting the specific molecular defect(s) within a given patient's tumor will become a more effective treatment strategy than traditional approaches that often target a given cancer type or sub-type. Synthetic genetic interactions are now being examined for their therapeutic potential and are designed to target the specific genetic and epigenetic phenomena associated with tumor formation, and thus are predicted to be highly selective. In general, two complementary approaches have been employed, including synthetic lethality and synthetic dosage lethality, to target aberrant expression and/or function associated with tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes, respectively. Here we discuss the concepts of synthetic lethality and synthetic dosage lethality, and explain three general experimental approaches designed to identify novel genetic interactors. We present examples and discuss the merits and caveats of each approach. Finally, we provide insight into the subsequent pre-clinical work required to validate novel candidate drug targets.

Web-services-based resource discovery model and service deployment on HealthGrids

HealthGrids represent the next generation of advanced healthcare IT and hold the promise to untangle complex healthcare-data problems by integrating health information systems and healthcare entities. Healthcare could benefit from a new delivery approach using HealthGrids to better meet the biomedical and health-related needs. Specialized services are needed to provide unified discovery of and ubiquitous access to available HealthGrid resources. The different types of services available on HealthGrids are classified into two levels, the operational-level services and the management-level services. This paper takes a fresh approach to address the problems of resource discovery in HealthGrids based on Web services (WS) and WS technologies and proposes a WS-based resource discovery model.