Welcome!

Posted by:

chris turck (group admin)

Date:

22 July 2008

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For various reasons it is now a good time to start our discussions on the ‘Biomarkers’ group. I am almost done with editing a book entitled ‘Biomarkers for Psychiatric Disorders’ (http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/book/978-0-387-79250-7) and will invite a number of scientists who have contributed chapters. Having said this forum of course is not restricted to psychiatric disorders but is meant for discussions on all disease areas.

Welcome everybody who has already joined the ‘Biomarkers’ group on ‘Nature Network’! We want to use this platform as a forum for discussions, information exchange, possibly also collaborations, joint grant applications – everything with the idea to advance the field of biomarker research. In addition, the forum could serve as a traditional ‘journal club’. Someone could pick a key paper from a scientific journal or a press article with relevance to the biomarker field and discuss its content with forum members.

A list of possible topics for the forum that is by no means complete:

Biomarkers – definition, what are the criteria for a good biomarker?
Why are they so important?
Applications
State of the art
What are the success stories?
What is the reality?
Types of biomarkers
Animal models
Human studies
What needs to be changed in terms of strategy to get at useful biomarkers?
Are the “–omics” approaches the way to get at the beast?
How can we translate biomarkers into the clinic?
What can biomarkers tell us about disease pathobiology?

I look forward to “meeting” everybody on the ‘Biomarkers’ forum real soon. Also, please spread the word to colleagues who might be interested in participating.

Chris Turck
Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry

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