{"id":5599,"date":"2012-05-19T09:25:43","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T23:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/?p=5599"},"modified":"2012-05-21T10:39:55","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T00:39:55","slug":"cancer-can-be-tracked-with-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/medicine\/cancer-can-be-tracked-with-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Cancer can be tracked with Google"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/p>\n

Tumours in the brain. Image: Shutterstock\/MichaelTaylor<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Scientists are using search engine algorithims to find cancer biomarkers.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Biomarkers can help detect cancers from body fluids or tissue. However, scientists have to spot the few relevant changes, among thousands, that are relevant for tumour aggressiveness, a difficult and time-consuming process.<\/p>\n

Looking at single isolated proteins can often reveal false positives, as they may appear to indicate the desired biomarkers across a large group, but then fail to do so for individual patients. One way to improve on this is to look at the network of relationships between these proteins, according to Dresden University of Technology<\/a>\u00a0scientists\u00a0Dr Christof Winter, lead author of the study published in\u00a0PLoS Computational Biology.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

“Cancer biomarkers often just capture what’s going\u00a0on inside the cancer cells and that only to some extent. But there is\u00a0so much more that affects the disease: immune system, diet, psyche,\u00a0environmental factors, probably chance, and most likely things we don’t\u00a0know yet.”<\/p>\n

Winter and his colleagues have used a modified version of Google’s PageRank algorithim to rank approximately 20,000 proteins. This has been done manually, but the researchers wanted an automated and more objective\u00a0way of integrating the network information.<\/p>\n

“We first experimented with\u00a0our own ideas on network algorithms until we realised that what we\u00a0needed existed already with the PageRank algorithm, so why reinvent the\u00a0wheel?”<\/p>\n

Using the network of interactions between genes and proteins, they mapped the activity of 20,000 genes in tumour cells for 30 patients and calculated how well these corresponded with patient survival time. They then combined the survival calculations with the relationships between genes and proteins and ran this algorithim over the network.<\/p>\n

“Instead of the PageRank that Google determines\u00a0and that indicates how important a web page is, we got a NetRank value \u00a0for each protein that allowed us to rank the proteins by their\u00a0importance for disease progression,” Winter says.<\/p>\n

The proteins are ranked according to their genetic relevance to the progression of pancreatic cancer. This ranking method will assist researchers in finding biomarkers for cancers.<\/p>\n

It will also assist clinicians in\u00a0determining how aggressive the patient’s cancer is and\u00a0deciding whether the patient needs chemotherapy.<\/p>\n

For more information about cancer biomarkers, check out the new issue of Science Illustrated<\/a>, on sale now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists are using search engine algorithims to find cancer biomarkers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,5,36,8,9],"tags":[863,120,848,74,178],"class_list":["post-5599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-medicine","category-news","category-science","category-technology","tag-cancer","tag-health-2","tag-news","tag-science-2","tag-technology-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5599"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5615,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions\/5615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}