Biological Background
Consider these statements:
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For patients with similar stages of a disease they can have varying responses to similar treatment and overall outcome.
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Our best chance against cancer seems to be diagnosing it early
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Drugs are currently designed to suit the needs of ~90% of the afflicted and only produce ~75% positive outcomes instead of being designed to work with 75% but produce 90% positive outcomes
These statements and observations are some of the key driving forces behind Bioinformatics and has most recently sparked the creation of the Precision Medicine Initiative by President Obama. "Far too many diseases do not have a proven means of prevention or effective treatments. We must gain better insights into the biology of these diseases to make a difference for the millions of Americans who suffer from them". - Precision Medicine Initiative
The goals of the GEO-AWS project are to provide a web application interface that is capable of computing advanced statistical survival and differential expression analysis of high-throughput functional genomics data. We hope this tool will aid scientific researchers to conduct research to identify biomarkers of short-term versus long-term prognoses based on patient expression profiles. Gene expression profiling could provide a strategy to select patients for personalized therapy. This goal aligns with the Precision Medicine Initiative.
The human genome contains approximately 21,000 genes. At any given moment, each of our cells has some combination of these genes turned on, and others are turned off. How do scientists figure out which are on and which are off? Scientists can answer this question for any cell sample or tissue by gene expression profiling, using a technique called microarray analysis.Microarray analysis involves breaking open a cell, isolating its genetic contents, identifying all the genes that are turned on in that particular cell, and generating a list of those genes.
A DNA micorarray allows scientists to perform an experiment on thousands of genes at the same time. Each spot (as known as probe) on a microarray contains multiple identical strands of DNA. The DNA sequence on each spot is unique. Each spot represents one gene. Thousands of spots are arrayed in orderly rows and columns on a solid surface (usually glass). The precise location and sequence of each spot is recorded in a computer database. Microarrays can be the size of a microscope slide, or even smaller. Source