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45 Biomedical Research Topics for You

Although choosing relevant biomedical research topics is often an arduous task for many, it shouldn’t be for you. You no longer have to worry as we have provided you with a list of topics in biomedical science in this write-up.

Biomedical research is a broad aspect of science, and it is still evolving. This aspect of science involves a variety of ways to prevent and treat diseases that lead to illness and death in people.

This article contains 45 biomedical topics. The topics were carefully selected to guide you in choosing the right topics. They can be used for presentations, seminars, or research purposes, as the case may be.

So, suppose you need topics in biomedical ethics for papers or biomedical thesis topics for various purposes. In that case, you absolutely have to keep reading! Are you ready to see our list of biomedical topics? Then, let’s roll.

Biomedical Engineering Research Topics

Biomedical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with providing solutions to problems in medicine and biology. Biomedical engineering research is an advanced area of research. Are you considering taking up research in this direction?

Research topics in this area cannot just be coined while eating pizza. It takes a lot of hard work to think out something meaningful. However, we have made a list for you! Here is a list of biomedical engineering topics!

• How to apply deep learning in biomedical engineering
• Bionics: the latest discoveries and applications
• The techniques of genetic engineering
• The relevance of medical engineering today
• How environmental engineering has affected the world

Biomedical Ethics Topics

There are ethical issues surrounding healthcare delivery, research, biotechnology, and medicine. Biomedical Ethics is fundamental to successful practice experience and is addressed by various disciplines. If you want to research this area, then you do not have to look for topics. Here’s a list of biomedical ethics for paper that you can choose from:

• The fundamentals of a physician-patient relationship
• How to handle disability issues as a health care sector
• Resource allocation and distribution
• All you need to know about coercion, consent, and or vulnerability
• Ethical treatment of subjects or animals in clinical trials

Relevant Biomedical Topics

Topics in Biomedical science are numerous, but not all are relevant today. Since biomedical science is constantly evolving, newer topics are coming up. If you desire in your topic selection, read on. Here is a list of relevant biomedical topics just for you!

• The replacement of gene therapy by gene editing
• Revolution of vaccine development by synthetic biology
• Introduction of artificial blood – the impact on the health sector
• Ten things know about artificial womb
• Transplanted reproductive organs and transgender birth

Biomedical Science Topics

Biomedical science is the aspect of scientific studies that focuses on applying biology and chemistry to health care. This field of science has a broad range of disciplines. If you intend to do research in this field, look at this list of research topics in biomedical science.

• The role of biomechanics in health care delivery
• Importance of biomaterials and regeneration engineering
• The application of cell and molecular engineering to medicine
• The evolution of medical instrumentation and devices
• Neural engineering- the latest discoveries

Seminar Topics for Biomedical Instrumentation

Biomedical science is constantly making progress, especially in the aspect of biomedical instrumentation. This makes it worthy of a seminar presentation in schools where it is taught. However, choosing a biomedical research topic for a biomedical instrumentation seminar may not come easy. This is why we have collated five brilliant topics for biomedical instrumentation just for you. They include:

• Microelectrode in neuro-transplants
• Hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy
• How concentric ring electrodes can be used to manage epilepsy
• How electromagnetic interference makes cochlear implants work
• Neuroprosthetics Management using Brain-computer interfaces (BCI)

Biomedical Engineering Topics for Presentation

One of the interesting aspects of biomedical science in biomedical engineering. It is the backbone that gives the biomedical science structure. Are you interested in making presentations about biomedical engineering topics? Or do you need biomedical engineering topics for paper? Get started here! We have compiled a list of biomedical engineering topics for you. Here they are:

• In-the-ear device to control stuttering: the basis of its operation
• How to implement the magnetic navigated catheterization
• Semiconductor-cell interfaces: the rudiments of its application
• The benefits of tissue engineering of muscle
• The benefits of sensitive artificial skin for prosthetic arms

Hot Topics in Biomedical Research

Biomedical research is fun because it is often relatable. As interesting as it seems, choosing a topic for research doesn’t come easy at all. Yet, there are also a lot of trending events around biomedical topics. To simplify your selection process, we have written out a few of them here.

Here are some hot biomedical research topics below.

• What is immunology, and what is the relevance today?
• Regenerative medicine- definition, importance, and application
• Myths about antibiotic resistance
• Vaccine development for COVID-19
• Infectious diseases now and before

Biomedical Research Topics

Biomedical research is an extensive process. It requires a lot of time, dedication, and resources. Getting a topic shouldn’t be added to that list. There are biomedical thesis topics and research topics in biomedical science for you here:

• Air pollution- sources, impact, and prevention
• Covid-19 vaccination- the effect on life expectancy
• Hyper insomnia- what is responsible?
• Alzheimer’s disease- newer treatment approaches
• Introduction of MRI compatible infusion pump

Biomedical Nanotechnology Topics

Biomedical research topics and areas now include nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has extended its tentacles to medicine and has been used to treat cancer successfully. This makes it a good research area. It is good for seminar presentations. Here are some biomedical nanotechnology topics below.

• The uses of functional particles and nanomaterials
• Nanoparticles based drug delivery system
• The incorporation of nanoporous membranes into biomedical devices
• Nanostructured materials for biological sensing
• Nanocrystals- imaging, transportation, and toxicity features

Seeking professional assistance to write your biomedical research or thesis? Look no further! At our reputable writing service, our experienced writers specialize in providing tailored support for the complexities of biomedical research. When you say, “ do my thesis for me ” we’re here to guide you through formulating research questions, conducting literature reviews, and analyzing data sets. Entrust the writing process to our experts while you focus on exploring the frontiers of biomedical research. Contact us today for a meticulously crafted thesis that enhances your chances of success.

We believe you have been thoroughly equipped with a list of biomedical topics. This way, you wouldn’t have to go through the stress of choosing a topic for research, seminars, or other educational purposes. Now that you have the topics at your fingertips make your choice and enjoy!

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Biomedical Research Paper Topics

This page offers students an extensive list of biomedical research paper topics , expert advice on how to choose these topics, and guidance on how to write a compelling biomedical research paper. The guide also introduces the services of iResearchNet, an academic assistance company that caters to the unique needs of each student. Offering expert writers, custom-written works, and a host of other features, iResearchNet provides the tools and support necessary for students to excel in their biomedical research papers.

100 Biomedical Research Paper Topics

Biomedical research is a vibrant field, with an extensive range of topics drawn from various sub-disciplines. It encompasses the study of biological processes, clinical medicine, and even technology and engineering applied to the domain of healthcare. Given the sheer breadth of this field, choosing a specific topic can sometimes be overwhelming. To help you navigate this rich landscape, here is a list of biomedical research paper topics, divided into ten categories, each with ten specific topics.

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1. Genetics and Genomics

• Role of genetics in rare diseases
• Advances in gene editing: CRISPR technology
• Human genome project: findings and implications
• Genetic basis of cancer
• Personalized medicine through genomics
• Epigenetic modifications and disease progression
• Genomic data privacy and ethical implications
• Role of genetics in mental health disorders
• Prenatal genetic screening and ethical considerations
• Gene therapy in rare genetic disorders

2. Bioengineering and Biotechnology

• Tissue engineering in regenerative medicine
• Bioprinting of organs: possibilities and challenges
• Role of nanotechnology in targeted drug delivery
• Biosensors in disease diagnosis
• Bioinformatics in drug discovery
• Development and application of biomaterials
• Bioremediation and environmental cleanup
• Biotechnology in agriculture and food production
• Therapeutic applications of stem cells
• Role of biotechnology in pandemic preparedness

3. Neuroscience and Neurology

• Pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease
• Advances in Parkinson’s disease research
• Role of neuroimaging in mental health diagnosis
• Understanding the brain-gut axis
• Neurobiology of addiction
• Role of neuroplasticity in recovery from brain injury
• Sleep disorders and cognitive function
• Brain-computer interfaces: possibilities and ethical issues
• Neural correlates of consciousness
• Epigenetic influence on neurodevelopmental disorders

4. Immunology

• Immune response to COVID-19
• Role of immunotherapy in cancer treatment
• Autoimmune diseases: causes and treatments
• Vaccination and herd immunity
• The hygiene hypothesis and rising allergy prevalence
• Role of gut microbiota in immune function
• Immunosenescence and age-related diseases
• Role of inflammation in chronic diseases
• Advances in HIV/AIDS research
• Immunology of transplantation

5. Cardiovascular Research

• Advances in understanding and treating heart failure
• Role of lifestyle factors in cardiovascular disease
• Cardiovascular disease in women
• Hypertension: causes and treatments
• Pathophysiology of atherosclerosis
• Role of inflammation in heart disease
• Novel biomarkers for cardiovascular disease
• Personalized medicine in cardiology
• Advances in cardiac surgery
• Pediatric cardiovascular diseases

6. Infectious Diseases

• Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases
• Role of antiviral drugs in managing viral diseases
• Antibiotic resistance: causes and solutions
• Zoonotic diseases and public health
• Role of vaccination in preventing infectious diseases
• Infectious diseases in immunocompromised individuals
• Role of genomic sequencing in tracking disease outbreaks
• HIV/AIDS: prevention and treatment
• Advances in malaria research
• Tuberculosis: challenges in prevention and treatment

7. Aging Research

• Biological mechanisms of aging
• Impact of lifestyle on healthy aging
• Age-related macular degeneration
• Role of genetics in longevity
• Aging and cognitive decline
• Social aspects of aging
• Advances in geriatric medicine
• Aging and the immune system
• Role of physical activity in aging
• Aging and mental health

8. Endocrinology

• Advances in diabetes research
• Obesity: causes and health implications
• Thyroid disorders: causes and treatments
• Role of hormones in mental health
• Endocrine disruptors and human health
• Role of insulin in metabolic syndrome
• Advances in treatment of endocrine disorders
• Hormones and cardiovascular health
• Reproductive endocrinology
• Role of endocrinology in aging

9. Mental Health Research

• Advances in understanding and treating depression
• Impact of stress on mental health
• Advances in understanding and treating schizophrenia
• Child and adolescent mental health
• Mental health in the elderly
• Impact of social media on mental health
• Suicide prevention and mental health services
• Role of psychotherapy in mental health
• Mental health disparities

10. Oncology

• Advances in cancer immunotherapy
• Role of genomics in cancer diagnosis and treatment
• Lifestyle factors and cancer risk
• Early detection and prevention of cancer
• Advances in targeted cancer therapies
• Role of radiation therapy in cancer treatment
• Cancer disparities and social determinants of health
• Pediatric oncology: challenges and advances
• Role of stem cells in cancer
• Cancer survivorship and quality of life

These biomedical research paper topics represent a wide array of studies within the field of biomedical research, providing a robust platform to delve into the intricacies of human health and disease. Each topic offers a unique opportunity to explore the remarkable advancements in biomedical research, contributing to the ongoing quest to enhance human health and wellbeing.

Choosing Biomedical Research Paper Topics

The selection of a suitable topic for your biomedical research paper is a critical initial step that will largely influence the course of your study. The right topic will not only engage your interest but will also be robust enough to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Here are ten tips to guide you in choosing the best topic for your biomedical research paper.

• Relevance to Your Coursework and Interests: Your topic should align with the courses you have taken or are currently enrolled in. Moreover, a topic that piques your interest will motivate you to delve deeper into research, resulting in a richer, more nuanced paper.
• Feasibility: Consider the practicality of your proposed research. Do you have access to the necessary resources, including the literature, laboratories, or databases needed for your study? Ensure that your topic is one that you can manage given your resources and time constraints.
• Novelty and Originality: While it is essential to ensure your topic aligns with your coursework and is feasible, strive to select a topic that brings a new perspective or fresh insight to your field. Originality enhances the contribution of your research to the broader academic community.
• Scope: A well-defined topic helps maintain a clear focus during your research. Avoid choosing a topic too broad that it becomes unmanageable, or so narrow that it lacks depth. Balancing the scope of your research is key to a successful paper.
• Future Career Goals: Consider how your chosen topic could align with or benefit your future career goals. A topic related to your future interests can provide an early start to your career, showcasing your knowledge in that particular field.
• Available Supervision and Mentoring: If you’re in a setting where you have a mentor or supervisor, choose a topic that fits within their area of expertise. This choice will ensure you have the best possible guidance during your research process.
• Ethical Considerations: Some topics may involve ethical considerations, particularly those involving human subjects, animals, or sensitive data. Make sure your topic is ethically sound and you’re prepared to address any related ethical considerations.
• Potential Impact: Consider the potential impact of your research on the field of biomedical science. The best research often addresses a gap in the current knowledge or has the potential to bring about change in healthcare practices or policies.
• Literature Gap: Literature review can help identify gaps in the existing body of knowledge. Choosing a topic that fills in these gaps can make your research more valuable and unique.
• Flexibility: While it’s essential to start with a clear topic, remain open to slight shifts or changes as your research unfolds. Your research might reveal a different angle or a more exciting question within your chosen field, so stay flexible.

Remember, choosing a topic should be an iterative process, and your initial ideas will likely evolve as you conduct a preliminary literature review and discuss your thoughts with your mentors or peers. The ultimate goal is to choose a topic that you are passionate about, as this passion will drive your work and make the research process more enjoyable and fulfilling.

How to Write a Biomedical Research Paper

Writing a biomedical research paper can be a daunting task. However, with careful planning and strategic execution, the process can be more manageable and rewarding. Below are ten tips to help guide you through the process of writing a biomedical research paper.

• Understand Your Assignment: Before you begin your research or writing, make sure you understand the requirements of your assignment. Know the expected length, due date, formatting style, and any specific sections or components you need to include.
• Thorough Literature Review: A comprehensive literature review allows you to understand the current knowledge in your research area and identify gaps where your research can contribute. It will help you shape your research question and place your work in context.
• Clearly Define Your Research Question: A well-defined research question guides your research and keeps your writing focused. It should be clear, specific, and concise, serving as the backbone of your study.
• Prepare a Detailed Outline: An outline helps organize your thoughts and create a roadmap for your paper. It should include all the sections of your research paper, such as the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.
• Follow the IMRaD Structure: Most biomedical research papers follow the IMRaD format—Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This structure facilitates the orderly and logical presentation of your research.
• Use Clear and Concise Language: Biomedical research papers should be written in a clear and concise manner to ensure the reader understands the research’s purpose, methods, and findings. Avoid unnecessary jargon and ensure that complex ideas are explained clearly.
• Proper Citation and Reference: Always properly cite the sources of information you use in your paper. This not only provides credit where it’s due but also allows your readers to follow your line of research. Be sure to follow the citation style specified in your assignment.
• Discuss the Implications: In your discussion, go beyond simply restating your findings. Discuss the implications of your results, how they relate to previous research, and how they contribute to the existing knowledge in the field.
• Proofread and Edit: Never underestimate the importance of proofreading and editing. Checking for grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, and clarity of language can enhance the readability of your paper.
• Seek Feedback Before Final Submission: Before submitting your paper, seek feedback from peers, mentors, or supervisors. Fresh eyes can often spot unclear sections or errors that you may have missed.

Writing a biomedical research paper is a significant academic endeavor, but remember that every researcher started where you are right now. It’s a process that requires time, effort, and patience. Remember, the ultimate goal is not just to get a good grade but also to contribute to the vast body of biomedical knowledge.

iResearchNet’s Custom Writing Services

Navigating the process of writing a biomedical research paper can be complex and demanding. At iResearchNet, we understand these challenges and strive to offer a stress-free, seamless solution to support your academic journey. With our roster of highly skilled, degree-holding writers, we are committed to delivering top-quality, custom-written papers tailored specifically to your individual requirements and desired outcomes.

• Expert Degree-Holding Writers: iResearchNet takes pride in our team of knowledgeable and experienced writers who hold advanced degrees in diverse fields. These writers are not only academic experts but are also keenly in tune with the complex landscape of biomedical research. This breadth and depth of expertise ensure that your paper benefits from a thorough understanding of the topic, resulting in a well-informed, academically credible document.
• Custom Written Works: We appreciate the unique academic goals and distinct requirements of each student. That’s why iResearchNet specializes in providing custom-written papers. Our aim is to capture your individual academic voice and perspective, blending it with our professional acumen to create a paper that reflects your specific academic needs and aspirations.
• In-Depth Research: Every paper that we produce is founded on the bedrock of extensive and in-depth research. Our writers are committed to exploring a wide range of credible and reputable sources to enrich your paper with diverse viewpoints and comprehensive information. This dedication to rigorous research ensures that your paper is not only thoroughly informed but also accurately referenced, adding to its academic integrity.
• Custom Formatting: Academic institutions often require different formatting styles. Be it APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, or Harvard, our writers are adept at all these academic formatting styles. We strive to adhere strictly to your specified formatting style, contributing to the polished and professional presentation of your paper.
• Top Quality: Quality is the cornerstone of our services at iResearchNet. We believe that each paper we craft should demonstrate a high standard of scholarship. Our writers dedicate their skills and effort to ensure every aspect of your paper, from clarity of language to depth of analysis and precision of information, reflects top-quality work.
• Customized Solutions: Recognizing that each research paper brings a distinct set of challenges and requirements, we offer customized solutions. Our approach is to thoroughly understand your specific needs and shape our writing services accordingly. We ensure that every aspect of your paper, from its overarching structure to the smallest details, aligns with your expectations.
• Flexible Pricing: We believe that high-quality academic writing services should be accessible. That’s why we offer our top-quality services at competitive prices, striking a careful balance between affordability and excellence. We provide a range of pricing options designed to cater to various budget needs without compromising on the quality of our services.
• Short Deadlines: Facing a fast-approaching deadline can be nerve-wracking. But with iResearchNet, you need not worry. Our expert writers are skilled at delivering high-quality papers under tight deadlines, even as short as three hours. Despite the time pressure, we ensure that the quality of your paper remains top-notch.
• Timely Delivery: At iResearchNet, we understand the critical importance of adhering to deadlines in the academic world. We commit to the timely delivery of all orders, ensuring that you are always able to submit your work on time. With our service, you can put aside worries about late submissions.
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• Money Back Guarantee: Your satisfaction is our ultimate goal. We strive to meet your expectations, but if for any reason the final work falls short, we offer a money-back guarantee. This policy is a testament to our confidence in the quality of our services and our commitment to your academic success.

At iResearchNet, we strive to be more than just a writing service provider. We aspire to be a trusted academic partner, providing support and expertise to help you navigate the complexities of writing a biomedical research paper. With our combination of expert knowledge, high commitment to quality, and excellent customer service, we are the ideal choice for all your academic writing needs.

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Are you ready to elevate your academic journey and achieve your full potential? At iResearchNet, we are prepared to be your trusted partner every step of the way. Our team of expert writers, experienced in biomedical research, are ready and waiting to transform your academic vision into a top-quality, custom-written biomedical research paper that meets all your requirements.

Navigating the complexities of biomedical research can be overwhelming, but with iResearchNet, you don’t have to do it alone. Our dedicated team of professionals is committed to taking the stress out of the writing process, allowing you to focus on your learning. Imagine the relief of knowing your assignment is in the hands of experienced, degree-holding experts who are passionate about your success. With our meticulous research and thorough understanding of biomedical topics, we guarantee a paper that not only meets but surpasses your expectations.

From in-depth research and custom formatting to a final product that reflects the highest academic standards, iResearchNet provides a comprehensive solution for your academic needs. And it’s not just about delivering excellent papers. Our commitment extends to providing an exceptional experience marked by 24/7 support, absolute privacy, and a transparent order tracking system.

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Nih research matters.

December 22, 2021

2021 Research Highlights — Promising Medical Findings

Results with potential for enhancing human health.

With NIH support, scientists across the United States and around the world conduct wide-ranging research to discover ways to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. Groundbreaking NIH-funded research often receives top scientific honors. In 2021, these honors included Nobel Prizes to five NIH-supported scientists . Here’s just a small sample of the NIH-supported research accomplishments in 2021.

Printer-friendly version of full 2021 NIH Research Highlights

20210615-covid.jpg

Advancing COVID-19 treatment and prevention

Amid the sustained pandemic, researchers continued to develop new drugs and vaccines for COVID-19. They found oral drugs that could  inhibit virus replication in hamsters and shut down a key enzyme that the virus needs to replicate. Both drugs are currently in clinical trials. Another drug effectively treated both SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, another serious respiratory virus, in animals. Other researchers used an airway-on-a-chip to screen approved drugs for use against COVID-19. These studies identified oral drugs that could be administered outside of clinical settings. Such drugs could become powerful tools for fighting the ongoing pandemic. Also in development are an intranasal vaccine , which could help prevent virus transmission, and vaccines that can protect against a range of coronaviruses .

202211214-alz.jpg

Developments in Alzheimer’s disease research

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s is an abnormal buildup of amyloid-beta protein. A study in mice suggests that antibody therapies targeting amyloid-beta protein could be more effective after enhancing the brain’s waste drainage system . In another study, irisin, an exercise-induced hormone, was found to improve cognitive performance in mice . New approaches also found two approved drugs (described below) with promise for treating AD. These findings point to potential strategies for treating Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, researchers found that people who slept six hours or less per night in their 50s and 60s were more likely to develop dementia later in life, suggesting that inadequate sleep duration could increase dementia risk.

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New uses for old drugs

Developing new drugs can be costly, and the odds of success can be slim. So, some researchers have turned to repurposing drugs that are already approved for other conditions. Scientists found that two FDA-approved drugs were associated with lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease. One is used for high blood pressure and swelling. The other is FDA-approved to treat erectile dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension. Meanwhile, the antidepressant fluoxetine was associated with reduced risk of age-related macular degeneration. Clinical trials will be needed to confirm these drugs’ effects.

20210713-heart.jpg

Making a wireless, biodegradable pacemaker

Pacemakers are a vital part of medical care for many people with heart rhythm disorders. Temporary pacemakers currently use wires connected to a power source outside the body. Researchers developed a temporary pacemaker that is powered wirelessly. It also breaks down harmlessly in the body after use. Studies showed that the device can generate enough power to pace a human heart without causing damage or inflammation.

20210330-crohns.jpg

Fungi may impair wound healing in Crohn’s disease

Inflammatory bowel disease develops when immune cells in the gut overreact to a perceived threat to the body. It’s thought that the microbiome plays a role in this process. Researchers found that a fungus called  Debaryomyces hansenii  impaired gut wound healing in mice and was also found in damaged gut tissue in people with Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disease. Blocking this microbe might encourage tissue repair in Crohn’s disease.

20210406-flu.jpg

Nanoparticle-based flu vaccine

Influenza, or flu, kills an estimated 290,000-650,000 people each year worldwide. The flu virus changes, or mutates, quickly. A single vaccine that conferred protection against a wide variety of strains would provide a major boost to global health. Researchers developed a nanoparticle-based vaccine that protected against a broad range of flu virus strains in animals. The vaccine may prevent flu more effectively than current seasonal vaccines. Researchers are planning a Phase 1 clinical trial to test the vaccine in people.

20211002-lyme.jpg

A targeted antibiotic for treating Lyme disease

Lyme disease cases are becoming more frequent and widespread. Current treatment entails the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. But these drugs can damage the patient’s gut microbiome and select for resistance in non-target bacteria. Researchers found that a neglected antibiotic called hygromycin A selectively kills the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. The antibiotic was able to treat Lyme disease in mice without disrupting the microbiome and could make an attractive therapeutic candidate.

20211102-back.jpg

Retraining the brain to treat chronic pain

More than 25 million people in the U.S. live with chronic pain. After a treatment called pain reprocessing therapy, two-thirds of people with mild or moderate chronic back pain for which no physical cause could be found were mostly or completely pain-free. The findings suggest that people can learn to reduce the brain activity causing some types of chronic pain that occur in the absence of injury or persist after healing.

2021 Research Highlights — Basic Research Insights >>

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P ub M ed QA : A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering

Qiao Jin , Bhuwan Dhingra , Zhengping Liu , William Cohen , Xinghua Lu

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[PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1259) (Jin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)

• PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering (Jin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
• Qiao Jin, Bhuwan Dhingra, Zhengping Liu, William Cohen, and Xinghua Lu. 2019. PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering . In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) , pages 2567–2577, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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• Published: 27 March 2023

BioASQ-QA: A manually curated corpus for Biomedical Question Answering

• Anastasia Krithara   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0491-4507 1 ,
• Anastasios Nentidis 1 , 2 ,
• Konstantinos Bougiatiotis 1 &
• Georgios Paliouras 1  

Scientific Data volume  10 , Article number:  170 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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The BioASQ question answering (QA) benchmark dataset contains questions in English, along with golden standard (reference) answers and related material. The dataset has been designed to reflect real information needs of biomedical experts and is therefore more realistic and challenging than most existing datasets. Furthermore, unlike most previous QA benchmarks that contain only exact answers, the BioASQ-QA dataset also includes ideal answers (in effect summaries), which are particularly useful for research on multi-document summarization. The dataset combines structured and unstructured data. The materials linked with each question comprise documents and snippets, which are useful for Information Retrieval and Passage Retrieval experiments, as well as concepts that are useful in concept-to-text Natural Language Generation. Researchers working on paraphrasing and textual entailment can also measure the degree to which their methods improve the performance of biomedical QA systems. Last but not least, the dataset is continuously extended, as the BioASQ challenge is running and new data are generated.

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ThoughtSource: A central hub for large language model reasoning data

The SciQA Scientific Question Answering Benchmark for Scholarly Knowledge

Selective UMLS knowledge infusion for biomedical question answering

Background & summary.

More than 2 articles are published in biomedical journals every minute, leading to MEDLINE/PubMed 1 currently comprising more than 32 million articles, while the number and size of non-textual biomedical data sources also increases rapidly. As an example, since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an explosion of new scientific literature about the disease and the virus that causes it, with about 10,000 new COVID-19 related articles added each month 2 . This wealth of new knowledge plays a central role in the progress achieved in biomedicine and its impact on public health, but it is also overwhelming for the biomedical expert. Ensuring that this knowledge is used for the benefit of the patients in a timely manner is a demanding task.

BioASQ 3 (Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering) pushes research towards highly precise biomedical information access systems through a series of evaluation campaigns, in which systems from teams around the world compete. BioASQ campaigns run annually since 2012, providing data, open-source software and a stable evaluation environment for the participating systems. In the last ten years that the challenge has been running, around 100 different universities and companies, from all continents, have participated in BioASQ, providing a competitive, but also synergetic ecosystem. The fact that the participants of the BioASQ challenges are all working on the same benchmark data, facilitates significantly the exchange and fusion of ideas and eventually accelerates progress in the field. The ultimate goal is to lead biomedical information access systems to the maturity and reliability required by biomedical researchers.

BioASQ comprises two main tasks. In Task A systems are asked to automatically assign Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) 4 terms to biomedical articles, thus assisting the indexing of biomedical literature. Task B focuses on obtaining precise and comprehensible answers to biomedical research questions. The systems that participate in Task B are given English questions that are written by biomedical experts and reflect real-life information needs. For each question, the systems are required to return relevant articles, snippets of the articles, concepts from designated ontologies, RDF triples from Linked Life Data 5 , an ‘exact’ answer (e.g., a disease or symptom), and a paragraph-sized summary answer. Hence, this task combines traditional information retrieval, with question answering from text and structured data, as well as multi-document text summarization.

One of the main tangible outcomes of BioASQ is its benchmark datasets. The BioASQ-QA dataset that is generated for Task B, contains questions in English, along with golden standard (reference) answers and supporting material. The BioASQ data are more realistic and challenging than most existing datasets for biomedical expert question answering 6 , 7 . In order to achieve this, BioASQ employs a team of trained experts, who provide annually a set of around 500 questions from their specialized field of expertise. Figure  1 provides the lifecycle of the BioASQ dataset creation, which is presented in detail in the following sections. Using this process, a set of 4721 questions and answers have been generated so far, constituting a unique resource for the development of QA systems.

During the annotation phase of the BioASQ, the experts compose biomedical questions. The participating systems provide answers in the challenge. Finally, in the assessment phase, the experts manually assess the system responses and refine and extend the dataset.

The BioASQ infrastructure and ecosystem

Figure  2 summarises the main components of the BioASQ infrastructure, as well as key stakeholders in the related ecosystem. The BioASQ infrastructure includes tools for annotating data, tools for assessing the results of participating systems, benchmark repositories, evaluation services, etc. The infrastructure allows challenge participants to access training and test data, submit their results and be informed about the performance of their systems, in comparison to other systems. The BioASQ infrastructure is also used by the experts during the creation of the benchmark datasets and helps improve the quality of the data. In the following subsections, the different components of the BioASQ ecosystems are described.

The BioASQ infrastructure and ecosystem.

Expert team

As the goal of BioASQ is to reflect real information needs of biomedical experts, their involvement was necessary in the creation of the dataset. The biomedical expert team of BioASQ was first established in 2012, but has changed through the years. Several experts were considered at that time, from a variety of institutions across Europe. The final selection of the experts was based on the need to cover the broad biomedical scientific field, representing as much as possible, medicine, biosciences and bioinformatics. The members of the biomedical team hold positions in universities, hospitals or research institutes in Europe. Their primary research interests include: cardiovascular endocrinology, psychiatry, psychophysiology, pharmacology, drug repositioning, cardiac remodeling, cardiovascular pharmacology, computational genomics, pharmacogenomics, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, proteomics, mass spectometry, protein evolution, clinical information retrieval from electronic health records, and clinical practice guidelines. In total 21 experts have contributed to the creation of the dataset, 7 of whom have been involved most actively. The main job of the biomedical expert team is the creation of the QA benchmark dataset, using an annotation tool provided by BiOASQ. With the use of the tool, the experts can set their questions and retrieve relevant documents and snippets from MEDLINE. Additionally, the biomedical expert team assesses the responses of the participating systems. In addition to scoring the systems’ answers, during this process the experts have the opportunity to enrich and modify the gold material that they have provided, thus improving the quality of the benchmark dataset.

Regular physical and virtual meetings are organised with the experts. Partly, these meetings aim to train the new members of the team and inform the existing ones about changes that have happened. In particular, the goals of the training sessions are as follows:

Familiarization with the annotation and assessment tools used during the formulation and assessment of biomedical questions respectively. This step also involves familiarization of the experts with the specific types of questions used in the challenge, i.e. factoid, yes/no, list and summary questions. At the same time, the experts provide feedback and help shaping the BioASQ tools.

Familiarization with the resources used in BioASQ, both MEDLINE and various structured sources. The aim is to help the experts understand the data provided by these source, in response to different questions they may formulate.

Resolution of issues that come up during the question composition and assessment tasks. This is a continuous process that extends beyond the training sessions. Continuous support is provided to the experts, while the experts can also interact with each other and provide feedback on the data being created.

Data selection

The QA benchmark is based primarily on documents indexed for MEDLINE . In addition, a wide range of biomedical concepts are drawn from ontologies and linked data that describe different facets of the domain. The selected resources follow commonly used drug-target-disease triangle , which defines the prime information axes for medical investigations. The main principle is shown in Figure  3 .

The drug-target-disease triangle, adopted in BioASQ .

This “ knowledge-triangle ” supports the conceptual linking of biomedical knowledge databases and related resources. Based on this, systems can address questions, linking natural language questions with relevant ontology concepts. In this context, the following resources have been selected for BioASQ.

Drugs: Jochem 8 , the Joint Chemical Dictionary, is a dictionary for the identification of small molecules and drugs in text, combining information from UMLS, MeSH, ChEBI, DrugBank, KEGG, HMDB, and ChemIDplus. Given the variety and the population of the different resources in it, Jochem is currently one of the largest biomedical resources for drugs and chemicals.

Targets: Gene Ontology (GO) 9 , 10 is currently the most successful case of ontology use in bioinformatics and provides a controlled vocabulary to describe functional aspects of gene products. The ontology covers three domains: cellular component, molecular function, and biological process.

Universal Protein Resource (UniProt 11 ) provides a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information. Its protein knowledge base consists of two sections: SwissProt, which is manually annotated and reviewed, and contains more than 500 thousand sequences, and TrEMBL, which is automatically annotated and is not reviewed, and contains a few million sequences. In BioASQ the SwissProt component of UniProt is used.

Diseases: Disease Ontology (DO) 12 contains data associating genes with human diseases, using established disease codes and terminologies. Approximately 8,000 inherited, developmental and acquired human diseases are included in the resource. The DO semantically integrates disease and medical vocabularies through extensive cross-mapping and integration of MeSH, ICD, NCI’s thesaurus, SNOMED CT and OMIM disease-specific terms and identifiers.

Document Sources: The main source of biomedical literature is NLM’s MEDLINE and is accessible through PubMed and PubMed Central. PubMed, indexes over 34 million citations, while PubMed Central (PMC) provides free access to approximately 8.5 million full-text biomedical and life-science articles.

The Medical Subject Headings Hierarchy (MeSH) is a hierarchy of terms maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and its purpose is to provide headings (terms), which can be used to index scientific publications in the life sciences, e.g., journal articles, books, and articles in conference proceedings. The indexed publications may be searched through popular search engines, such as PubMed, using the MeSH headings to filter semantically the results. This retrieval methodology seems to be in some cases beneficial, especially when precision of the retrieved results is important 13 . The primary MeSH terms (called descriptors ) are organized into 16 trees, and are approximately 30,200. MeSH is the main resource used by PubMed to index the biomedical scientific bibliography in MEDLINE.

Linked Data: During the first few years of BioASQ, the Linked Life Data platform was used to identify subject-verb-object triples related to questions. Linked Life Data is a data warehouse that syndicates large volumes of heterogeneous biomedical knowledge in a common data model. It contains more than 10 billion statements. The statements are extracted from 25 biomedical resources, such as PubMed, UMLS, DrugBank, Diseasome, and Gene Ontology. This resource has been abandoned in recent editions of BioASQ, due to issues with the triple selection process.

Question formulation

The members of the biomedical expert team formulate English questions, reflecting real-life information needs encountered during their work (e.g., in diagnostic research). Figure  4 provides an overview of the most frequent topics covered in the questions generated so far by the experts. Each question is independent of all other questions and is associated with an answer and other supportive information, as explained below.

Most frequent topics in the BioASQ questions.

In addition to the training sessions mentioned above, guidelines are provided to the BioASQ experts to help them create the questions, reference answers, and other supportive information 14 . The guidelines cover the number and types of questions to be created by the experts, the information sources the experts should consider and how to use them, the types and sizes of the answers, additional supportive information the experts should provide, etc. The experts use the BioASQ annotation tool for this process, which is accessible through a Web interface.

The annotation tool provides the necessary functionality to create questions and select relevant information. The annotation tool is designed to be easy to use, adopting a simple five-step-paradigm: authenticate, search, select, annotate and store. The authentication ensures that each question created by a certain expert can be assigned to this given expert.

The annotation process comprises the following steps:

Step 1: Question formulation

The experts formulate an English stand-alone question, reflecting their information needs. Questions may belong to one of the following four categories:

Yes/no questions: These are questions that, strictly speaking, require either a “yes” or a “no” as an answer, though of course in practice a longer answer providing additional information is useful. For example, “ Do CpG islands colocalise with transcription start sites? ” is a yes/no question.

Factoid questions: These are questions that require a particular entity (e.g., a disease, drug, or gene) as an answer, though again a longer answer is useful. For example, “ Which virus is best known as the cause of infectious mononucleosis? ” is a factoid question.

List questions: These are questions that require a list of entities (e.g., a list of genes) as an answer; again, in practice additional supportive information is desirable. For example, “ Which are the Raf kinase inhibitors? ” is a list question.

Summary questions: These are questions that do not belong in any of the previous categories and can only be answered by producing a short text summarizing the most prominent relevant information. For example, “ How does dabigatran therapy affect aPTT in patients with atrial fibrillation? ” is a summary question. When formulating summary questions, the experts aimed at questions that they can answer in a satisfactory manner with a one-paragraph summary, intended to be read by other experts of the same field. In all four categories, the experts aim at questions for which a limited number of articles (min. 10, max. 60) are retrieved through PubMed queries. Questions which are controversial or that have no clear answers in the literature are avoided. Moreover, all questions are related to the biomedical domain. For example, in the case of the following two questions:

Q 1 : Which are the differences between Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) ?

Q 2 : Which are the uses of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in gene prediction?

Although HMMs and ANNs are used in the biomedical domain, Q 1 is not suitable for the needs of BioASQ, since there is not a direct indication that it is related to the biomedical domain. On the other hand, Q 2 links to “gene prediction” and is appropriate.

Step 2: Relevant concepts

A set of terms that are relevant to each question is selected. The set of relevant terms may include terms that are already mentioned in the question, but it may also include synonyms of the question terms, closely related broader and narrower terms etc. For the question “ Do CpG islands colocalise with transcription start sites? ”, the set of relevant terms would most probably include the question terms “ CpG Island ” and “ transcription start site ”, but possibly also other terms, like the synonym“ Transcription Initiation Site ”.

Step 3: Information retrieval

Using the selected terms, the BioASQ annotation tool allows the experts to issue queries and retrieve relevant articles through PubMed. More than one query may be associated with each question and each query can be enriched with the advanced search tags of PubMed. The search window (Figure  5 ) allows selecting information that is necessary to answer the question. One of the main powers of the annotation tool is that it implements interfaces to different data sources of different types, i.e., unstructured, semi-structured or structured. Given that we cannot expect domain experts to be familiar with Semantic Web standards, such as RDF, the annotation tool also implements an innovative natural language generation method that converts RDF into natural language. The iterative improvement of the annotation tool has led to a framework that is widely accepted by the BioASQ biomedical expert team. Interestingly, a study of the queries used by different experts to answer the same questions made clear that indeed “many roads lead to Rome”, i.e. different experts will use different queries for the same question.

Screenshot of the annotation tool’s search and data selection screen with the section for document results expanded.

Returning to the example question “ Do CpG islands colocalise with transcription start sites? ” a query may be “ CpG Island ” AND “ transcription start site ”. Some of the articles retrieved by this query are shown in Table  1 .

Step 4: Selection of articles

Based on the results of Step 3, the experts select a set of articles that are sufficient for answering the question. Using the annotation tool, they choose among the retrieved list of articles, the ones that contain relevant information to form an answer.

Step 5: Text snippet extraction

Using the articles selected in step 4, the experts mark every text snippet (piece of text) out of the articles selected in Step 4. Snippets can be easily extracted using the annotation tool (Figure  6 ) and may answer the question either fully or partially. A text snippet should contain one or more entire and consecutive sentences. If there are multiple snippets that provide the same (or almost the same) information (in the same or in different articles), all of them are selected. Examples of relevant snippets are shown in Table  2 .

Screenshot of the annotation tool’s snippet annotation process.

Step 6: Query revision

If the expert judges that the articles and snippets gathered during steps 2 to 5 are insufficient for answering the question, the process can be repeated. The articles that the expert has already selected can be saved before performing a new search, along with the snippets the expert has already extracted. The query can be revised several times, until the expert feels that the gathered information is sufficient to answer the question. At the end, if the expert judges that the question can still not be answered adequately, the question is discarded.

Step 7: Exact answer

In steps 2 to 6, the expert identifies relevant material for answering the question. Given this material, the next step is to formulate the actual answer. For a yes/no question, the exact answer is simply “yes” or “no”. For a factoid question, the exact answer is the name of the entity (e.g., gene, disease) sought by the question; if the entity has several synonyms, the expert provides, to the extent possible, all of its synonyms. For a list question, the exact answer is a list containing the entities sought by the question; if a member of the list has several synonyms, the expert provides again as many of the synonyms as possible. For a summary question, the exact answer is left blank. The exact answers of yes/no, factoid, and list questions should be based on the information of the text snippets that the expert has selected, rather than personal experience.

Step 8: Ideal answer

At this final step, the expert formulates what we call an ideal answer for the question. The ideal answer should be a one-paragraph text that answers the question in a manner that the expert finds satisfactory. The ideal answer should be written in English, and it should be intended to be read by other experts of the same field. For the example question “ Do CpG islands colocalise with transcription start sites? ”, an ideal answer might be the one shown in Table  3 . Again, the ideal answer should be based on the information of the text snippets that the expert has selected, rather than personal experience. The experts, however, are allowed (and should) rephrase or shorten the snippets, order or combine them etc., in order to make the ideal answer more concise and easier to read.

Notice that in the example above, the ideal answer provides additional information supporting the exact answer. If the expert feels that the exact answer of a yes/no, factoid, or list question is sufficient and no additional information needs to be reported, the ideal answer can be the same as the exact answer. For summary questions, an ideal answer must always be provided.

Figure  7 presents the distribution of questions created each year of the challenge. Over the years, there is an increase in the number of factoid questions, and a decrease in the number of list questions. The possible reason is that it is more difficult to find the material (i.e. articles and snippets) that are sufficient for answering a factoid question than a list question. Table  4 presents the different versions of the BioASQ-QA dataset, including the number of questions, and the average number of documents and snippets. Each version of the training dataset enriches its previous version with the new questions created the respective year.

Distribution of types of questions per year.

During the years that BioASQ has been running, three significant changes have taken place, in response to feedback obtained by the experts and the challenge participants:

Since BioASQ 3 (2015), the focus of the experts is only on relevant articles and their contents. In other words, the experts do not provide relevant concepts or statements, as it was found cumbersome and led to questionable results. Nevertheless, concepts are included in the gold dataset, as they are added by the systems and assessed by the experts in the assessment phase).

Since BioSQ 4 (2016) only a sufficient set of articles, that allow the answer to be found with confidence, is requested by the experts. This is again in contrast to earlier years, where the experts were asked to identify all relevant articles; something that proved to be unrealistic. Again, if the participating systems retrieve more relevant documents, not identified in the annotation phase by the experts, these are added in the gold dataset, during the assessment phase.

In early versions of the challenge, we considered using full-text articles from PubMed Central (PMC). Given the small percentage of the overall literature that appears in PMC, since BioASQ 4 (2016) we decided to restrict the challenge to article abstracts only.

Following each round of the challenge, the answers of the participating systems are collected and assessed. Exact answers can be assessed automatically against the golden answers provided by the experts during the annotation phase. However, the ‘ideal’ answers are assessed manually by the experts. In fact each expert gets to assess the answers to the questions they have created, in terms of information recall (does the ‘ideal’ answer reports all the necessary information?), information precision (does the answer contain only relevant information?), information repetition (does the ‘ideal’ answer avoid repeating the same information multiple times? e.g., when sentences of the ‘ideal’ answer that have been extracted from different articles convey the same information), and readability (is the ‘ideal’ answer easily readable and fluent?). A 1 to 5 scale is used in all four criteria (1 for ‘very poor’, 5 for ‘excellent’).

The assessment tool is designed to be a companion to the annotation tool and is implemented by reusing most of its functionality. The tool can also be used to perform an inter-annotator agreement study. In that case, domain experts are provided with answers generated by other (anonymous) domain experts and are asked to evaluate them.

The design of the interface is such that the users can always see the answers/annotations only to questions that they are asked to review (Figure  8 ). Moreover, the interface can adapt to different question types, by showing different answering fields for each of them. Finally, all information sources that were used to answer the question can also be reviewed. By these means, domain experts can perform an informed assessment.

Assessment tool for evaluating system answers. The gold standard answer is at the top.

The assessment tool plays a key role in the creation of the benchmark and the quality assurance of the results generated by the experts during the BioASQ challenges. Moreover, the assessment tool allows the experts to improve their own gold answers and associated material, based on the answers provided by the systems. In particular, the experts revise the documents and snippets returned by the systems, and enrich the gold answers with material identified by the systems. This leads to an improvement of the benchmark datasets that are provided publicly.

Data Records

The dataset is available at Zenodo 15 and follows the JSON format. Specifically, it contains an array of questions, where each question (represented as an object in the JSON format) is constructed as shown in Table  5 .

Technical Validation

Improving the state-of-the-art performance.

The participation of strong research teams in the BioASQ challenge has helped to measure objectively the state-of-the-art performance in biomedical question answering 16 , 17 , 18 . During BioASQ this performance has improved (Figures 10 ,  11 , 12 ). It is particularly encouraging that the BioASQ biomedical expert team have assessed the ideal answers provided by the participating systems as being of very good quality. The average manual scores are above 80% (above 4 out of 5 in Fig.  12 ). Still, there is much room for improvement and the future challenges of BioASQ, as well as the benchmark datasets that it provides, will hopefully push further towards that direction.

Based on the evaluation of the participating systems from the experts, one very interesting result is that humans seem satisfied by “imperfect” system responses. In other words, they are satisfied if the systems provide the information and answer needed, even if it is not perfectly formed.

Inter-annotation agreement

An inter-annotation agreement evaluation has been conducted in order to evaluate the consistency of the dataset. To this end, during the first six years, a small subset of the created questions, was given to other experts, in order to compare the different formulated answers. The pairs of experts answer the exact same questions. As each of them uses their own queries, they get a different list of possible relevant documents. The latter leads to the selection of different documents and snippets to answer the questions, which leads to low mean F1 score (<50%) (Figure  9a ). Nevertheless, in the formulated ideal answers, there is a high agreement between the experts (Figure  9b ). In other words, they reach the same or very similar answers, but following different paths.

Inter-annotator agreement: ( a ) Scores of the snippets and the documents retrieved by the additional expert, compared to the original one; and ( b ) average manual scores of the expert ideal answers.

The performance achieved by systems in exact answer generation, across different years of the BioASQ challenge. For each test set the performance of the best performing system (Top) is presented based on the official evaluation measures. Since BioASQ6 the macro-averaged F1 score (macro F1) is the official measure for Yes/No questions, but accuracy (Acc), the former official measure, is also presented.

The performance achieved by systems in the information retrieval part of Task B, across different years of the BioASQ challenge. For each test set the performance of the best performing system (Top) is presented, based on the official evaluation measures.

The performance achieved by systems in the ideal answer generation part of Task B, across different years of the BioASQ challenge. For each test set the performance of the best performing system (Top) is presented based on the official evaluation measures. In BioASQ 4, the performance was lower due to the fact that it was the first time BioASQ run after the end of the EU-funded project, and the top teams in ideal answer generation started participating after the second batch of the same year.

Another important point is that the BioASQ challenge, as well as the environment in which it takes place, evolve. One consequence of this is the changes that we had to make in the data generation process in response to feedback from the experts and the participants. Additionally, the evolution of vocabularies and databases cause complications. For example, each year’s data are annotated with the current version of the MeSH hierarchy, which is updated annually. In addition, only the articles of the current year of annotation are used for formulating the answers, while articles that will appear in the future may also be of relevance. These are issues that we need to handle and adapt to them, in order to have real-life, useful challenge and relevant dataset.

The BioASQ challenge will continue to run in the coming years, and the dataset will be further enriched with new interesting questions and answers.

Usage Notes

Up to date guidelines and usage examples pertaining the dataset can be found in: http://participants-area.bioasq.org/

Code availability

BioASQ has created a lively ecosystem, supported by tools and systems that facilitate the creation of the benchmarks. All software is provided with open-source licenses ( https://github.com/BioASQ ). In addition, the data produced are open to the public 15 .

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Acknowledgements

Google was a proud sponsor of the BioASQ Challenge in 2020, 2021, and 2022. BioASQ was also sponsored by Atypon Systems inc. and VISEO. BioASQ is grateful to the biomedical experts, who have created and manually curated the dataset, as well as to the participants during all these years. Also, BioASQ is grateful to NIH/NLM, who has supported the project by two conference grants (grant n.5R13LM012214-02 and 5R13LM012214-03). For the first two years, BioASQ has received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013, ICT-2011.4.4(d), Intelligent Information Management, Targeted Competition Framework) under grant agreement n. 318652.Last but not least, BioAQ is grateful to all past collaborators, namely the University of Houston (US), Transinsight GmbH (DE), Universite Joseph Fourier (FR), University Leipzig (DE), Universite Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6 (FR), Athens University of Economics and Business – Research Centre (GR).

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G.P. and A.K. originated the BioASQ challenge and dataset creation. All authors participated in the collection of the data, the development of the annotation and the evaluation tools, and validated the data. A.K. and A.N. drafted the manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anastasia Krithara .

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Krithara, A., Nentidis, A., Bougiatiotis, K. et al. BioASQ-QA: A manually curated corpus for Biomedical Question Answering. Sci Data 10 , 170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02068-4

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02068-4

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• v.21(2); 2020 Feb 5

Real‐time ethics engagement in biomedical research

Jeremy sugarman.

1 Johns Hopkins, Baltimore MD, USA

Annelien L Bredenoord

2 University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht the Netherlands

Biomedical research often raises ethical questions that are usually addressed ad hoc or in retrospective. Real‐time ethical engagement as part of research may be better suited to identify ethical issues.

Biomedical research inevitably involves ethical issues. Some raise broad public concerns, particularly when researchers obviously violate established ethical norms. For example, He Jiankui's work using CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically modify human embryos to prevent HIV transmission, which resulted in the birth of the world's first two gene‐edited babies, generated widespread condemnation of this use of human germline modifications. Ethical issues also arise in the earlier phases of basic research, such as the public release of the HeLa cell genome by the European Molecular Biological Laboratory that created controversy over privacy concerns. At other times, ethical issues are more subtle and may not be recognized as such or raise public concern. For instance, there are important ethical considerations related to using banked biospecimens in translational research. Similarly, creating neurological chimeric mouse models involves moral considerations related to the potential humanization of these models 1 , and embryo models from human stem cells are entangled in debates about the moral status of the embryo 2 .

Nonetheless, efforts should be taken to identify and manage ethical issues as early as possible in order to provide ethical guidance throughout the entire research process, and mitigate negative effects, harms and wrongs (K.R. Jongsma & A.L. Bredenoord, under review). In this paper, we describe how ethics expertise can contribute to biomedical research through real‐time engagement and some of the challenges associated with such efforts. To do so, we offer our experiences with two particular examples: organoid technology and umbilical cord blood (UCB) banking and transplantation.

… efforts should be taken to identify and manage ethical issues as early as possible in order to provide ethical guidance throughout the entire research process…

Is there an ethicist in the laboratory?

What exactly constitutes (bio)ethics expertise is far from a settled issue even though the issues have been broadly discussed in clinical settings 3 . Nonetheless, some distinctive elements can be identified, such as skills in reasoning about morally relevant concepts and arguments, and an understanding of relevant literature and precedents. Regardless, ethics expertise can contribute to research policies and practices in several ways. First, ethicists can help to identify and raise awareness about whether ethical challenges are involved in particular research efforts. Second, they can alert scientists to relevant guidelines or scholarship. Third, they can provide normative judgments and deliberate about appropriate courses of action or the development of novel treatments and technologies. Fourth, they can help anticipate societal impact. Fifth, they can employ methods from the social sciences to conduct empirical bioethics research with, for example, end users (patients, professionals, data subjects), to inform an anticipatory and constructively guiding approach to research practices (K.R. Jongsma & A.L. Bredenoord, under review).

Just as in clinical settings, ethics engagement can take different forms. Ad hoc consultation—the “beeper ethicist”—is a familiar way of involving ethicists in clinical practice, such as whether to discontinue life‐sustaining interventions. Ad hoc consultations are also employed for ethical questions in basic and translational research. This approach may be incredibly valuable and sufficient for some research, but a single consultation may miss the potential for more added value of what ethicists can contribute.

At the other side of the spectrum is having an ethicist or ethics team work alongside 4 or embedded with the research team. This can vary from “desk experiments” where ethicists work with teams of basic and translational researchers, to robust, real‐time engagement that involves normative research and obtaining empirical data to help inform deliberations and decision‐making (K.R. Jongsma & A.L. Bredenoord, under review). To ground this discussion in real examples, we describe our experience with real‐time ethics engagement that has employed both conceptual–normative and empirical aspects to address organoid technology and UCB banking and transplantation.

Organoid technology

Organoids are three‐dimensional self‐organized tissue cultures derived from stem cells. Organoids can be studied as models for organ growth and development, to test medications, or for transplantation. For example, gut organoids are used in the context of precision medicine for cystic fibrosis (CF), brain organoids can be used to study the biological aspects of psychiatric conditions, liver organoids are being developed for transplantation, and gastruloids that resemble early‐stage embryos provide insights into early embryonic development 5 .

Of particular relevance are concerns about conflicts of interest if ethicists merely provide window dressing for what others might consider to be unethical research.

At an early stage, pioneers in organoid research recognized that while organoids have enormous scientific and clinical potential, there were some associated ethical issues, so they approached the University Medical Center Utrecht ethics team for advice 5 . A small interdisciplinary team subsequently analyzed the ethics and research implications of organoid technology throughout the research cycle, from fundamental preclinical research to translational and clinical applications, as well as the societal impacts 5 . The team also looked at the ethics of organoid biobanking. Internal funding made it possible to have a small team of ethicists embedded in both the Hubrecht Institute where the organoids were developed and the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital whose patients participated in organoid‐related research.

Organoid technology is particularly promising for CF, as it offers a strikingly accurate personalized model of the disease. Intestinal organoids, derived from rectal biopsy material, permit the prediction of individual drug response 6 , but the value and concerns regarding this emerging technology were initially unclear. The team therefore decided to explore patients’ perspectives on organoid technology in a qualitative study. Specifically, the team conducted 23 interviews with 26 respondents: 14 adult patients and 12 parents of young patients with CF 6 . In addition, the team conducted three focus groups with patients or parents of patients with metabolic disorders, to discuss the ethical challenges of a first in human liver organoid transplantation trial. These empirical studies provided invaluable input about what patients and tissue donors perceive as the key ethical dimensions of organoid technology.

Cystic fibrosis patients and their parents, for example, expressed an ambiguous relationship to organoids as both closely and distantly related to themselves. These and other findings inspired further reflection on the moral status of organoids and other key ethical themes such as commercial use, consent, and governance. Particularly, the notion of organoids as hybrids that relate to persons and their bodies and to technologies and markets in ambiguous ways helped to prompt rethinking about the (commercial) use and exchange of organoids in an ethically sound way 7 .

The ethical challenges of organoid research are not limited to national borders, as legislation regarding the derivation, use, and storage of stem cells and the launch of clinical trials can be different on national, European Union (EU), and international levels. At the moment, the Utrecht ethics group is involved in an EU H2020 project aimed at building a European Organoid Biobank for patients with rare CF mutations ( http://www.hitcf.org ), where the ethics team co‐produces the governance and ethics of this biobank.

Umbilical cord blood banking and transplantation

Umbilical cord blood banking is now commonplace, and UCB transplantation is a standard treatment option for a variety of diseases and conditions. However, as these practices were first being explored, an array of ethical challenges were encountered. Relatively soon after the first successful UCB transplantation was performed and the first UCB banks were being constructed, one of the scientific leaders sought ethics expertise, which initially resulted in a collaborative conceptual scoping paper, outlining some of the main ethical issues 8 .

As described in more detail elsewhere 9 , a series of ethics activities followed. First, in order to include the perspectives of additional stakeholders, a working group was assembled to deliberate the relevant issues and to offer guidance. Second, given that the informational needs and perspectives of pregnant women regarding the possible collection of UCB were unclear, a series of focus groups was conducted that proved invaluable in designing and implementing a recruitment and informed consent process for a public UCB bank. Third, in order to assess the effectiveness of these processes, a quantitative survey of those who donated UCB was performed. Fourth, qualitative analyses of marketing messages of different cord blood banks were carried out to inform deliberations about their ethical appropriateness. Subsequently, ad hoc consultations have been used to address emerging issues in UCB transplantation, for example, as it is being explored for non‐malignant conditions.

Potential barriers

Despite the benefits, robust ethics engagement can face a series of potential barriers. For example, scientists must be open to ethics engagement and inquiry, and that requires collaboration, openness, time, and resources. It may also include the need for funding, which may not be trivial; however, in our experience, it accounts for only a small fraction of the funding for most scientific endeavors. When there are insufficient funds available to support ethics engagement, it can be possible to seek institutional or external support. Yet, the process of obtaining funding may take considerable time, slowing down the analyses of the ethical issues as research is proceeding.

There are options for engaging ethics expertise into basic and translational research in ways that can be grounded in the realities of scientific research.

Of course, ethics engagement can itself be associated with ethics concerns. Of particular relevance are concerns about conflicts of interest if ethicists merely provide window dressing for what others might consider to be unethical research. As with conflicts of interests associated with research in general, the nature of support and contributions should be transparent in describing the work and any resulting guidance, including publications and presentations. Depending on the nature of the initiative, it can be prudent to somehow involve those who are otherwise external to the project or an institution in developing or reviewing recommendations and publications. Additional ethics concerns arise when conducting empirical bioethics research, which can usually be addressed through existing oversight mechanism, such as review (or review exemption) by research ethics committees.

Further reading

Boers SL, Van Delden JJM, Clevers H, Bredenoord AL (2016) Organoid biobanking: identifying the ethics. EMBO Reports 17(7):938–41

This paper reviews whether and to what extent organoids give new twists to the ethical challenges in stem cell research and related fields, particularly the ethical challenges related to the donation, storage, and use of organoids.

Boers SN, Bredenoord AL (2018) Consent for governance in the ethical use of organoids. Nature Cell Biology 20:642–645

The authors propose consent for governance as a promising paradigm for the derivation, storage, and use of complex human tissue products, among which organoids. Consent for governance entails an initial consent procedure that provides donors with information on governance and shifts the ethical emphasis from initial consent to ongoing governance obligations, which include protection of donor privacy, participant engagement, benefit sharing, and ethical oversight.

Bruce CR, Peña A, Kusin BB, Allen NG, Smith ML, Majumder MA (2014) An embedded model for ethics consultation: characteristics, outcomes, and challenges. AJOB Empirical Bioethics 5:3, 8–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/23294515.2014.889775

In this paper, the authors describe a model of clinical ethics consultation, which they term “embedded ethics” and involves embedding clinical ethics consultants within clinical specialties and subspecialties based on institutional needs and areas of clinical ethicists’ expertise.

Huch M, Gehart H, van Boxtel R, Hamer K, Blokzijl F, Verstegen MM, Ellis E, van Wenum E, Fuchs SA, de Ligt J, van de Wetering M, Sasaki N, Boers SJ, Kemperman H, de Jonge J, IJzermans JN, Nieuwenhuis EE, Hoekstra R, Strom S, Vries RR, van der Laan LJ, Cuppen E, Clevers H (2015) Long‐term culture of genome‐stable bipotent stem cells from adult human liver. Cell 160(1–2):299–312

This report describes that single mouse Lgr5 + liver stem cells can be expanded as epithelial organoids in vitro and can be differentiated into functional hepatocytes in vitro and in vivo. The authors also delineate conditions allowing long‐term expansion of adult bile duct‐derived bipotent progenitor cells from human liver.

Porter KM, Danis M, Taylor HA, Cho, MK, Wilfond BS, on behalf of the Clinical Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative Repository Group (2018) The emergence of clinical research ethics consultation: insights from a national collaborative. The American Journal of Bioethics 18:1, 39–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2017.1401156

The report describes a national research ethics consultation (REC) service as a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. This is a reaction to the increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight.

Travis J. Privacy flap forces withdrawal of DNA data on cancer cell line. Science 2013 March 26. Available at: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/03/privacy-flap-forces-withdrawal-dna-data-cancer-cell-line

This paper describes the controversy after the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) announced that a research team had deciphered much of the genetic sequence of the widely used HeLa cell line and had made the information available publicly. EMBL has withdrawn those data and apologized for potentially violating the privacy of Henrietta Lacks, the woman who was the original source of the cells, and that of her descendants.

Concluding comments

There are options for engaging ethics expertise into basic and translational research in ways that can be grounded in the realities of scientific research. While we have provided some examples based on our experience, more rich descriptions of both good and bad experiences with ethics engagement are needed to help inform the refinement of these approaches. Such information should be useful in establishing best practices for ethics engagement to improve the process of science. This seems far superior to retrospective ethics critiques once work is published. More importantly, engaging ethics expertise should enhance the possibility of conducting ethically sound research.

Conflict of interest

Jeremy Sugarman is a member of Merck KGaA's Bioethics Advisory Panel and Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee; is a member of IQVIA's Ethics Advisory Panel; and has been a consultant to Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Annelien Bredenoord is a member of IQVIA's Ethics Advisory Panel.

EMBO Reports (2020) 21 : e49919 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

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Top 10 Biomedical Issues of the Next Decade

Some biomedical trends will defuse old arguments; others will spark new disputes

By Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D.

Forecasting the future is a dangerous activity. Still, even if forcasting is difficult, it is important to try to anticipate what is to come in the not-so-distant future, if only to trigger the requisite public debate about the ethics of what is perhaps likely to come. So, in the service of keeping the ethics ahead of the biomedical science, here are my top 10 picks for exciting, likely, troubling, and attention-grabbing issues for the next 10 years. I look forward to the addendums and emendations that are sure to come!

1. GMOs save crops struggling with climate change and beset by plant pests that find climate change advantageous

Anti-GMO sentiment will flip as the world utterly fails to achieve control over climate change. With temperatures rising, droughts increasing, and the climate becoming more turbulent, genetically engineered plants are increasingly the Band-Aid to maintain food supply, expand growing seasons, and battle pests. The “value” of genetic engineering becomes self-evident as farmers and fishermen struggle to maintain yields and famine threatens many parts of the world.

2. IVF clinics do vast bulk of their business making healthier babies for the fertile

A drop in the number of people seeking infertility treatment pushes clinics to offer more services to fertile persons that could help achieve “healthier” offspring. Investors own and control clinics, and they market “better” babies aggressively around the world. Richer families seeking an edge in a highly competitive world increasingly turn to these services, ignoring the protests of some who see the emphasis on “health” as code for eugenics.

3. Efforts at protecting patient privacy are abandoned as benefits from full big data meta-studies take off

More and more benefits in terms of earlier diagnoses, preventive measures, and lifestyle enhancements flow from the use of big data. Increasingly interlinked, big data takes in healthcare information around the world. Privacy is not a priority for a generation that has grown up expecting none. The older generation of civil libertarians who see privacy as vital begins to die off. Laws protecting privacy have proven utterly ineffective, especially as hacking remains widespread and bribing data managers to provide access becomes more common. Laws and legislation affirming privacy begin to be abandoned.

4. First transgender birth occurs thanks to transplanted reproductive organs

The entire female reproductive system—uterus, ovary, fallopian tubes—is now transplantable. Those involved in transitioning their gender will pay money to undergo what is essentially experimental surgery but is not in clinical trials given the commercialization of IVF working with transplant programs. Donor organs are hard to obtain, but the first baby has been born via reproductive system transplantation.

5. Gene editing begins to replace gene therapy as therapeutic modality of choice in embryos, fetuses, newborns, and young children

The safety of gene editing along with greater precision has fueled interest in eliminating—and not just treating—genetic diseases and risk factors. Embryo editing is becoming routine for many conditions, some of which are oriented toward enhancement and improvement. Gene therapies are still in use, but genetic medicine and counseling are shifting toward prevention. Some governments are taking an interest in encouraging gene editing to control the high cost of healthcare and disability services.

6. Synthetic biology revolutionalizes vaccine development

Needles and jabs are gone. Genetically edited viruses can be inhaled, opening a new route for vaccinations and helping us fend off most viral and bacterial infections. These can also be used in animals to reduce reliance on antibiotics. The same technology is beginning to be used to help clean out blood vessels clogged with fatty deposits.

7. Artificial blood is introduced, prompting blood banks to shut down and encouraging medics to stock up

The dream of artificial blood, permitting universal donation, is achieved using synthetic biology, cloning, and better bioincubation. This means safer but more expensive transfusions as viral and bacterial risks fall to zero. Blood matching is rapidly disappearing, as is the need for blood drives and blood collections. In the field, transfusion is becoming routine for a variety of needs including traumatic accidents, gunshot wounds, and injuries caused by combat and terrorism. Poorer nations are desperate to acquire the technology (as they have never been able to achieve safe, adequate blood supplies), but the price is prohibitive. The Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos Foundations are under enormous pressure to subsidize cost.

8. Life forms are created from scratch

The mystery of “life” has yielded to biological reductionism. Synthetic biologists are creating functioning microbes from DNA and artificial cell parts. The line between organic and inorganic is found to reside in particular genetic messages. Our understanding of how life might have evolved on earth or elsewhere is greatly enhanced.

9. Hospitals close some units as home-based care and residential care rapidly grow

Increasingly, elderly persons desire care for terminal and chronic conditions at home. Telemedicine, better implantables, and robot-assisted chronic care make this option more attractive and lower in cost than institutional care. The explosion in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological impairments overwhelms the capacity of hospitals and nursing homes, leading to some closure of units in hospitals and nursing homes. Tax breaks and other incentives have led to the beginning of a shift to more residential/home care.

10. First artificial womb is used to deliver preemie infant at 18 weeks

Scientists and biomedical researchers, having studied artificial wombs in sheep, pigs, and primates, have begun to deploy them at a few academic medical centers for fetuses born before 23 weeks with underdeveloped lungs. The experiments require a reexamination of the concept of “viability,” stoking the ongoing battles over abortion in the United States and elsewhere. Some nations and states could pass laws mandating the use of this new, experimental technology.

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD ( [email protected] ), is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Robert I. Grossman School of Medicine.

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Title: pubmedqa: a dataset for biomedical research question answering.

Abstract: We introduce PubMedQA, a novel biomedical question answering (QA) dataset collected from PubMed abstracts. The task of PubMedQA is to answer research questions with yes/no/maybe (e.g.: Do preoperative statins reduce atrial fibrillation after coronary artery bypass grafting?) using the corresponding abstracts. PubMedQA has 1k expert-annotated, 61.2k unlabeled and 211.3k artificially generated QA instances. Each PubMedQA instance is composed of (1) a question which is either an existing research article title or derived from one, (2) a context which is the corresponding abstract without its conclusion, (3) a long answer, which is the conclusion of the abstract and, presumably, answers the research question, and (4) a yes/no/maybe answer which summarizes the conclusion. PubMedQA is the first QA dataset where reasoning over biomedical research texts, especially their quantitative contents, is required to answer the questions. Our best performing model, multi-phase fine-tuning of BioBERT with long answer bag-of-word statistics as additional supervision, achieves 68.1% accuracy, compared to single human performance of 78.0% accuracy and majority-baseline of 55.2% accuracy, leaving much room for improvement. PubMedQA is publicly available at this https URL .

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What Jobs Can You Get With A Biology Degree - A New Scientist Careers Guide

• Career guides

“What can I do with a biology degree?” is a question biology students often ask themselves. Everything from microscopic proteins and the DNA within the cells of all living organisms to how we interact with complex ecological systems on Earth falls under the realm of biology. Some of the major types of biology include molecular biology , anatomy, physiology and ecology .

With science becoming more interdisciplinary, new careers in biology are emerging as well. Indeed, a degree in biology provides you with knowledge and skills highly relevant to countless industries. 

Graduating from the best universities for biology in the UK, as ranked in the 2024 league table by the Complete University Guide, can lead to lucrative career opportunities. Top universities include Cambridge, University College London (UCL), Oxford, Imperial College London and Durham.

Popular areas where your biology degree will be highly valued include pure biology and life sciences , clinical science , technology and engineering , and environmental science . This article discusses the top three highest paying jobs with a biology degree in each of these fields.

Pure biology and life sciences

Traditional jobs for biology graduates typically involve teaching, research or health promotion. In these fields, you could inspire future biological scientists and conduct high-impact research. With experience and excellence, you could even become a pioneer in whichever area you work in, helping progress the field of biology as a whole.  

• Headteacher

Job role: Headteachers run schools and ensure their success. They are the face of the school and they set out the school’s values and agenda, devise strategies for areas of improvement, comply with health and safety standards, manage finances and foster relationships with students, parents, teachers and, sometimes, politicians. You can still continue to teach biology as a headteacher.

Route: With a biology degree, you could start teaching biology at school once you complete the qualified teacher status (QTS). Get involved with senior roles within your school and help with running the school. Ideally, complete the National Professional Qualification for Headship. After several years of experience as a senior teacher, you could become a headteacher. 

Average salary (experienced): £131,000  

• Professor of biology

Job role: Teaching biological sciences at higher education level is no small feat. Senior lecturers and academics at universities are typically pioneers in their area of interest and have contributed greatly to research, especially at renowned institutions.

Route: Once you have graduated with a BSc in biology, you usually need a Master’s to enter a PhD programme. After working as a research scientist, getting involved in lecturing and doing high-impact research as a postdoc for several years, you could apply for professorship. Senior academics usually end up doing research in a niche area of biology.

Average salary (experienced): £55,000; over £100,000 at certain universities e.g. Cambridge  

• Sports physiologist

Job role: Sports and exercise scientists apply their knowledge of human physiology to help people enhance their sporting performance and improve their overall health. Their working environment may include sports centres, hospitals or research facilities. Many work privately, seeing a range of clients including athletes.

Route: A degree in physiology or biology is typically required; a Master’s or PhD specifically in sports physiology or exercise science can further enhance your employability. After you have established a good reputation, you could manage your own consulting company or work exclusively for high-profile athletes.

Average salary (experienced): £60,000

Naturally, biology is at the heart of medicine and healthcare . Expertise in fields such as genetics , microbiology and biochemistry are driving innovation in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. If you completed a biology degree, you could do a Master’s, clinical training or placements to qualify for a range of clinical careers.  

• Pathologist

Job role: Pathologists process and examine tissue samples collected from patients to aid the diagnosis of medical conditions. They work with high-tech machines and microscopes and are usually based in hospital labs.

Route: Relevant undergraduate degrees include biology or biomedical science. To work in the NHS, you must enrol onto the Scientist Training Programme (STP) and register with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). You could additionally complete Higher Specialist Scientist Training (HSST) to obtain consultant status.

Average salary (experienced): £69,000

• Clinical scientist

Job role: Clinical scientists can work in a range of specialisms, such as neurophysiology, cardiac science or microbiology. They form a crucial part of a multidisciplinary team to deliver healthcare efficiently and safely. Your exact duties will depend on your chosen career path and may include working as a laboratory technician or seeing patients and performing tests.

Route: This job also involves completion of the STP and HCPC registration, and, optionally, HSST for consultancy. A biology degree is broad enough to allow you to move into most specialisms in clinical science. As a senior clinical scientist, you could take on managerial roles in your department or apply your expertise in biotech , e.g. quality control or research and development.

Average salary (experienced): £68,000

Job role: Geneticists analyse the genomics in all living organisms, but in a clinical setting their focus is limited to human genetics. They study genes involved in health and disease to help medical teams diagnose and offer targeted therapies for genetic conditions and cancers. 

Route: Relevant pre-STP degrees include genetics, biology or other life sciences. A Master’s or PhD is the norm, particularly in academic research. With experience, you could manage genomic research departments, become a professor or move into industries, e.g. the pharmaceutical sector.

Average salary (experienced): £58,000

Technology and engineering

As with most industries, research, medicine and agriculture are becoming heavily reliant on technology. Fields such as biotechnology, bioinformatics and biomedical engineering require excellent knowledge of biology as well as engineering and physics principles. As such, biology graduates with an interest in technological innovation can play a vital role in the biotech sector.

• Data scientist

Job role: Data science is one of the highest paying jobs in tech, particularly in life sciences that deal with large amounts of complex data. Data scientists with a background in biology perform complex data analysis for universities, research facilities or biotech companies with the aim of providing actionable insight.

Route: After a biology degree, you could either do a Master’s in data science or gain relevant experience to land a junior position. Learning advanced methods relating to machine learning and artificial intelligence can significantly boost your job prospects. With experience, you could become a principal data scientist at a biotech firm or an independent consultant data scientist.

Average salary (experienced): £82,500

• Software engineer

Job role: Software engineers with a background in biology design, build and test software for use in biological research at hospitals, labs or biotech firms. They ensure their programme meets their clients’ needs and troubleshoot any potential errors.

Route: A biology degree puts you in a good position to apply to biotech firms for junior positions as employers often prefer candidates with in-depth knowledge of the field. To gain programming skills, you can do a Master’s in software development or become self-taught. With experience, you could move into consultancy or run your own business.

Average salary (experienced): £70,000

• Biomedical engineer

Job role: Biomedical engineering combines principles from biology, physics and engineering to design medical machines and equipment, ranging from prosthetics and implants to surgical robots and scanners. Those in this field often conduct research to build new products to be used in healthcare.

Route: An undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering is the traditional route, but you can still enter this field with a biology degree if you do a relevant Master’s or gain relevant experience, e.g. working as a biological technician. 

As a senior biomedical engineer working in a specialised area, e.g. bionic eyes, you could move into industry and take on managerial roles in health-tech companies. You could also work for the NHS if you complete the STP and register with the HCPC.

Average salary (experienced): £50,000

Environmental and animal care

Biologists working in the environmental and animal care sector offer immense value when it comes to tackling global challenges such as sustainability, conservation , biodiversity and restoration. Environmental scientists can help shape policies and practices aimed at preserving natural environments and safeguarding animal welfare , ensuring a better, greener world.  

Job role: Agronomists supervise agricultural operations and offer guidance to farmers on enhancing soil health and increasing crop yields. Working environments include farms, laboratories and offices. They research soil properties, fertilisers and other substances, and innovate new farming techniques.

Route: A degree in biology with exposure to agriculture is typically sufficient to secure junior positions. Some employers prefer candidates with postgraduate qualifications in certain areas, e.g. crop technology. You could move into consultancy if you become a specialist in advanced methods such as laser weeding.

• Environmental consultant

Job role: Eco consultants investigate the effects of an organisation’s activities on the climate and vice versa. They provide guidance to organisations or governmental bodies on green energy, waste management and environmental regulations. 

Route: After your biology degree, ideally with a focus on ecology, you could complete a Master’s in environmental science to maximise your chances of landing a job and reaching consultancy level quickly. The Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) may be of interest, as it offers postgraduate courses with academic and industrial research projects. With experience, you could become a chartered consultant.

Job role: Zoologists explore animals and their behaviours and may work in academia, wildlife conservation or government. They develop specialisation in one field, such as entomology (insects), ornithology (birds), herpetology (reptiles) or marine biology . Tasks vary based on the sector, but typically involve applying research methods in the field or laboratory to study animals.

Route: Aim to focus on zoology for your biology degree and gain exposure to wildlife conservation. A Master's or PhD degree can significantly enhance your prospects, particularly if you wish to conduct independent research. As you gain experience, you could manage zoology departments, become a consultant or move into environmental journalism.

Average salary (experienced): £48,000

Biology degrees provide a breadth of knowledge about all living organisms and how they interact with the world surrounding them. This, along with their critical thinking and transferable skills, make biology graduates highly employable across sectors. From analysing molecules in disease to building artificial organs or even conserving endangered species, there is no shortage of jobs involving biology .

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Published May 16, 2024

The late M. Laura Feltri, MD

The Empire Discovery Institute (EDI) has entered into a collaborative research partnership with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and its commercial development program Fast Forward, LLC, that builds on drug development research initiated by the late M. Laura Feltri, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of biochemistry and neurology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences .

Through a competitive application and review process, EDI was awarded $791,933 from Fast Forward along with technical support from its network of key opinion leaders in multiple sclerosis (MS) who will help contribute to the advancement of EDI’s technology.

EDI is a non-profit New York drug discovery and development accelerator created to translate promising scientific discoveries into new break-through treatments and cures, support vital upstate New York pharmaceutical research efforts, and foster the development of a vibrant biotech start-up community within New York State.

It was made possible through a New York State seed grant from Empire State Development and through a research partnership with the University at Buffalo, University of Rochester and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Pioneering Work on MS Drug Design and Development

Fast Forward provides research funding to commercial entities who develop promising new therapies for the treatment of MS, a demyelinating disease of the central nervous system impacting the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.

EDI has been incubating an early-stage drug discovery project that originated from Feltri, an internationally renowned pioneer in the study and treatment of myelin diseases of the nervous system.

Feltri and the EDI scientific team discovered novel small molecules which have the potential to stimulate the repair of nerve damage by promoting remyelination in MS and other white matter injuries. The Fast Forward award will support continued optimization of these small molecule drug candidates.

“We look forward to working with our National MS Society partners at Fast Forward to advance this work toward human clinical studies,” says Ron Newbold, PhD, EDI’s CEO. “By combining scientific innovation and pharmaceutical industry expertise, EDI’s goal of promoting the efficient translation of fundamental scientific discoveries from academia into important new medicines is becoming reality.”

EDI officials said they were saddened to learn of the passing of Feltri in late 2023 after a long battle with cancer, but plan to continue the work she guided throughout her storied career.

“Empire Discovery Institute is deeply grateful to Fast Forward for its support," says Venu Govindaraju, PhD, EDI board member and vice president of research and economic development at UB.

“We are honored by this award and look forward to continuing our esteemed colleague Dr. Feltri’s life’s achievements, legacy and the institute’s important work in advancing drug treatments for MS patients around the world.”

National MS Society Founded in 1946

For Fast Forward, this partnership represents a continuation of its dedication to support novel research efforts aimed at advancing promising treatments for MS patients. “Fast Forward is pleased to provide significant financial and intellectual support to this Empire Discovery Institute program, as it offers the potential to slow or stop the progression of demyelination in people who have progressive forms of MS,” says Walter Kostich, PhD, associate vice president, translational research at the National MS Society.

“We look forward to collaborating with EDI on this program as it aligns closely with the Pathways to Cures Roadmap, in particular to stop progression and to promote myelin repair and protection.”

The National MS Society, founded in 1946, is the global leader of a growing movement dedicated to creating a world free of MS. It funds cutting-edge research for a cure, drives change through advocacy and provides programs and services to help people affected by MS live their best lives.

This University of Utah medical school alum runs largest biomedical research institute in the world

By marjorie cortez, deseret news | posted - may 18, 2024 at 10:07 a.m., dr. monica m. bertagnolli, director of the national institutes of health, speaks at the university of utah's spencer fox eccles school of medicine commencement at the jon m. huntsman center in salt lake city on friday. (megan nielsen, deseret news).

Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

SALT LAKE CITY — It was a full circle moment.

Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, director of the National Institutes of Health, sat on the dais Friday taking in commencement exercises for the University of Utah's Spencer Fox School of Medicine's class of 2024.

Thirty-nine years ago, Bertagnolli was sitting among her medical school classmates for her own medical school graduation ceremony at the University of Utah. There were fewer than 10 women in her graduating class in 1985. This year, 54% of the graduating class are women.

After medical school, Bertagnolli trained in surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital and was a research fellow in tumor immunology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is the first woman to lead the institute's surgical oncology division.

She has been at the forefront of the field of clinical oncology. Her research focuses on the genetic mutations that lead to gastrointestinal cancer and how inflammation stimulates cancer.

Prior to her appointment as the director of the National Institutes of Health in 2023, Bertagnolli was director of the National Cancer Institute. NIH is the largest biomedical research institute in the world. It has 27 institutes and centers and has an annual budget of more than $47 billion.

Bertagnolli, who delivered the commencement address, reflected on significant advances in the treatments for hemophilia and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, since she graduated from medical school.

"We celebrate that for a disease that was formerly highly debilitating and sometimes lethal, the life expectancy for people in the United States with hemophilia is now equal to that of the general population and we can now entertain the possibility of a cure," she said.

In the early 1980s, when Bertagnolli started medical school, an AIDS diagnosis "was considered a death sentence," she said.

"We did not know what to do to treat it or how to prevent its spread," she said.

It wasn't until the mid-1980s that a blood test to detect the human immunodeficiency virus was widely available in the United States.

Despite public health campaigns intended to contain HIV spread, new diagnoses and fatalities rapidly escalated in the United States and around the world.

"In June 1995, the FDA approved the first protease inhibitor targeting HIV replication and just six months later came the first combination regimen targeting viral replication. ... AIDS diagnoses and deaths began to fall almost immediately," she said.

Treatments have continued to advance with the development of antiretroviral and pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, drugs.

"As a result, mortality rates for those infected with HIV have now approached that of the general population," Bertagnolli said.

While there have been many advances in medical science over the years and new tools at researchers' disposal, many challenges remain to develop treatments and perhaps cures for diseases that continue to vex researchers.

For example, some 35 million people in the United States suffer from rare diseases, many of which are tied to mutation of a single gene, Bertagnolli said.

"How do we scale the development of gene therapy to meet the needs of those with rare diseases? If we succeed, how do we pay for this? This is the hope that so many have been looking for and we can't let them down," she said.

Today's researchers have exciting tools that help increase the pace of developing treatments or vaccines, she said.

One significant technological advance has been the electronic health record, which has had broad adoption across the country.

"It's a way when each of us goes to see a doctor, it has information about us, what happened, what our health was, how we were treated and that gets recorded. One of the things we're working on at the NIH and across all of the Health and Human Services Department is to develop ways where we can use the information coming from the electronic health record and every clinical visit as a way of improving health," she said.

Online shoppers are keenly aware that e-commerce merchants track their purchases. "They know exactly who we are and what we're interested in," she said.

Medical researchers can use that same technology in a respectful way, with people's permission, "which I also am pretty passionate about. I don't think we should be doing research with people's health information unless we have their direct permission. So with people's permission, it's being able to use this technology to benefit everyone," said Bertagnolli, who grew up on a ranch in southwest Wyoming and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University.

Trust plays a significant role in use of the data and encouraging patients to try new treatments or vaccines.

During the pandemic, some people balked at vaccination, which Bertagnolli said was understandable considering the pandemic's disruption of people's lives, concerns that some people who were vaccinated still got COVID-19, and medical science's evolving understanding of the virus.

Even though some people contracted COVID-19 after vaccination, they tended to have milder cases. The vaccines also provide relief for some patients with "long COVID."

But deciding whether to get vaccinated is personal.

"I wouldn't want to go to somebody who really really really didn't want to take a vaccine and try and convince them otherwise. That's just not appropriate. People get to decide based on whatever their belief systems are, what is right for them. That's their decision. But what I would do instead is really try to get their trust for other things," she said.

"'Are there other things that you that can directly benefit from, that you can be a research partner for?' We certainly don't build trust by preaching to people or giving out public service announcements. We build trust by being present, being respectful and helping people get what they need. Research that meets the needs of the individual people, that really delivers for them, is going to build this trust."

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Highlights of Biomaterials International 2024

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The Biomaterials International (BMI) conference is a prominent gathering for the exchange and demonstration of innovative concepts and progress in biomaterials, attended by representatives from academia and industry worldwide. BMI-2024 is scheduled to be held from June 30-July 4, 2024, in Bangkok, Thailand, and will be organized by Chang Gung University and Mahasarakham University. The conference provides an exceptional opportunity for researchers to showcase and debate the latest advancements in biomaterials, effectively representing cutting-edge advances in the field. The Research Topic will compile a set of scientific publications encompassing the fundamental aspects introduced at BMI-2024 from a multitude of scientific domains, such as biology, physiology, materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, and clinical science, related to biomaterials, methods, and approaches. Furthermore, a series of collections will concentrate on the utilization of biomaterials in biomechanics, biosensors and biochips, and biomedical optoelectronics, among others. Our objective is to utilize this occasion to provide readers with the current cutting-edge research and development in biomaterials by creating a comprehensive summary of the outcomes presented in one location. Topics to be included in the conference, and in this collection are: -Biodegradable materials and devices -Metallic biomaterials -Ceramic biomaterials -Smart materials -Synthesis and fabrication of biomaterials and devices -Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering -Interactions of biomaterials and cells -Nanoscale biomaterials -Delivery of drug, gene, vaccine, and active biomolecules -Functionalization and bioactivity -Biomaterials applications in biomechanics, biosensors and biochips, biomedical optoelectronics

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John Joannopoulos receives 2024-2025 Killian Award

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John Joannopoulos, an innovator and mentor in the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics and nanophotonics, has been named the recipient of the 2024-2025 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.

Joannopoulos is the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics and director of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for 50 years.

“Professor Joannopoulos’s profound and lasting impact on the field of theoretical condensed matter physics finds its roots in his pioneering work in harnessing ab initio physics to elucidate the behavior of materials at the atomic level,” states the award citation, which was announced at today’s faculty meeting by Roger White, chair of the Killian Award Selection Committee and professor of philosophy at MIT. “His seminal research in the development of photonic crystals has revolutionized understanding of light-matter interactions, laying the groundwork for transformative advancements in diverse fields ranging from telecommunications to biomedical engineering.”

The award also honors Joannopoulos’ service as a “legendary mentor to generations of students, inspiring them to achieve excellence in science while at the same time facilitating the practical benefit to society through entrepreneurship.”

The Killian Award was established in 1971 to recognize outstanding professional contributions by MIT faculty members. It is the highest honor that the faculty can give to one of its members.

“I have to tell you, it was a complete and utter surprise,” Joannopoulos told MIT News shortly after he received word of the award. “I didn’t expect it at all, and was extremely flattered, honored, and moved by it, frankly.”

Joannopoulous has spent his entire professional career at MIT. He came to the Institute in 1974, directly after receiving his PhD in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also earned his bachelor’s degree. Starting out as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, he quickly set up a research program focused on theoretical condensed matter physics.

Over the first half of his MIT career, Joannopoulos worked to elucidate the fundamental nature of the electronic, vibrational, and optical structure of crystalline and amorphous bulk solids, their surfaces, interfaces, and defects. He and his students developed numerous theoretical methods to enable tractable and accurate calculations of these complex systems.

In the 1990s, his work with microscopic material systems expanded to a new class of materials, called photonic crystals — materials that could be engineered at the micro- and nanoscale to manipulate light in ways that impart surprising and exotic optical qualities to the material as a whole.

“I saw that you could create photonic crystals with defects that can affect the properties of photons, in much the same way that defects in a semiconductor affect the properties of electrons,” Joannopoulos says. “So I started working in this area to try and explore what anomalous light phenomena can we discover using this approach?”

Among his various breakthroughs in the field was the realization of a  “perfect dielectric mirror” — a multilayered optical device that reflects light from all angles as normal metallic mirrors do, and that can also be tuned to reflect and trap light at specific frequencies. He and his colleagues saw potential for the mirror to be made into a hollow fiber that could serve as a highly effective optical conduit, for use in a wide range of applications. To further advance the technology, he and his colleagues launched a startup, which has since developed the technology into a flexible, fiber-optic “surgical scalpel.”

Throughout his career, Joannopoulos has helped to launch numerous startups and photonics-based technologies.

“His ability to bridge the gap between academia and industry has not only advanced scientific knowledge but also led to the creation of dozens of new companies, thousands of jobs, and groundbreaking products that continue to benefit society to this day,” the award citation states.

In 2006, Joannopoulos accepted the position as director of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), a collaboration between MIT researchers, industry partners, and military defense experts, who seek innovations to protect and enhance soldiers’ survivability in the field. In his role as ISN head, Joannopoulos has worked across MIT, making connections and supporting new projects with researchers specializing in fields far from his own.

“I get a chance to explore and learn fascinating new things,” says Joannopoulos, who is currently overseeing projects related to hyperspectral imaging, smart and responsive fabrics, and nanodrug delivery. “I love that aspect of really getting to understand what people in other fields are doing. And they’re doing great work across many, many different fields.”

Throughout his career at MIT, Joannopoulos has been especially inspired and motivated by his students, many of whom have gone on to found companies, lead top academic and research institutions, and make significant contributions to their respective fields, including one student who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998.

“One’s proudest moments are the successes of one’s students, and in that regard, I’ve been extremely lucky to have had truly exceptional students over the years,” Joannopolous says.

His many contributions to academia and industry have earned Joannopoulos numerous honors and awards, including his election to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“The Selection Committee is delighted to have this opportunity to honor Professor John Joannopoulos: a visionary scientist, a beloved mentor, a great believer in the goodness of people, and a leader whose contributions to MIT and the broader scientific community are immeasurable,” the award citation concludes.

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13 Biosystems Engineering seniors participate in 2024 Craig M. Berge Design Day

Four of the 11 projects Biosystems Engineering students participated in received an award, with one project winning Best Overall Design.

Team members of the Mobile Alfalfa Drying System project at the UA Mall for the 2024 Craig M. Berge Design Day.

Murat Kacira

This spring, 13 students with the Department of Biosystems Engineering competed for a chance to win thousands of dollars in awards for completing innovative projects in areas ranging from aerospace and electronics to energy. During the Craig M. Berge Design Day , interdisciplinary teams of four to six seniors demonstrated their abilities to design and build projects sponsored by industry partners and faculty members—a big reason employers view our students as industry-ready!

"Through their dedication to innovation and unwavering commitment to excellence, Biosystems Engineering students continue to redefine the boundaries of possibilities in Capstone Designs and in the College of Engineering Design Day,” said Murat Kacira , interim head of the Department of Biosystems Engineering. “Their outstanding work, along with that of their project teams, stands as testament to their ingenuity and passion for creating a better world.”

The Biosystems Engineering students participated in 11 teams. Notably, four projects were recognized with an award, with one project, the “Autonomous Multi-Legged Robot for Crop/Turf Management,” sponsored by the Biosystems Engineering Department, earning Best Overall Design for its second consecutive year. The award is presented to the project that embodies the best attributes of engineering design and the engineering profession.

“With each project, our students are not just innovating, they are shaping the future and leaving an indelible impact on our world," Kacira said.

Raytheon Award for Best Overall Design

Autonomous multi-legged robot for crop/turf management .

Goal: Create a bio-inspired crop-monitoring robot that can automatically determine the health of a field.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Annalisa Minke

Sponsor: Biosystems Engineering Department

Faculty Advisors: Brian Little, Mark Siemens, Pedro Andrade Sanchez

The Autonomous Multi-Legged Robot for Crop/Turf Management team

Bly Family Award for Innovation in Energy Production, Supply or Use

Plastic recycling, carbon capture and disaster relief through pyrolysis.

Goal: Design and construct a small-scale pyrolysis plant that safely converts municipal waste into fuel.

Biosystems Engineering Students:  Ben Hunt  &  Gracie Reinholz

The Plastic Recycling, Carbon Capture and Disaster Relief Through Pyrolysis team

Mark Brazier Award for Best Biomedical Systems Design

Modular Biomedical Sensor Board for Education

Goal: Develop an educational platform capable of measuring seven physiological signals, enabling students to gather and analyze data safely and effectively.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Michael Chase Morrett

Rincon Research Award for Best Presentation, Larry Head Award for Best Video Capturing the Project Story

WATER-SAFE – PFAS/Microplastic Water Detection System for Environmental and Human Health

Goal: Develop a low-cost method of microplastic and PFAS detection in drinking water.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Matthew Martinez

Phospho-Dx a Point-of-Care Phosphorus Diagnostic System for Chronic Kidney Disease Patient Safety

Goal: Offer a noninvasive, at-home method of measuring phosphorus content in foods and fluids using sensing, machine learning and analysis.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Taylor Lansky

Vibroshear: A System for High-Throughout Drug Discovery of Agents Limiting Shear-Mediated Cell (Platelet) Activation

Goal: Develop a complete system to mechanically activate platelets to test the efficacy of agents that might limit shear-mediated platelets activation.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  JayCee Angel Miller

Repurposing Hemp/Cannabis Biomass: Fiber Extraction and Fractionation to Make Valuable Biobased Raw Materials

Goal: Design and build a transportable machine for separating fibers from cannabis/hemp stalks to facilitate the creation of valuable bio-based products.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Natalie D’Angelo

F1 Drug Detector

Goal: Redesign and enhance the “red head” component of the F1 Drug detector from Lightsense Technology.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Caroline Elizabeth Kenyon 

Aquaponic Media Cleaning Device

Goal: Design and deploy a device capable of autonomously cleaning Light Expanded Clay Aggregate (LECA) media for integration into aquaponic farming systems.

Biosystems Engineering Student:  Lauren Vasquez & Jeff Hortwitz

Faculty Advisors: Matthew “Rex” Recsetar

Mobile Alfalfa Drying System

Goal: Design a portable drying system equipped with a forced and heated air system that will decrease the total amount of drying time for alfalfa.

BE Student: Marco Eduardo Andrade Meza

Irrigation Canal Cleaning Tool

Goal: Develop a hydraulic tool attachment to remove sediment buildup within a concrete-lined irrigation canal for the Bard Water District.

Biosystems Engineering Student: Jo Guler

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