Research and discovery in the life sciences is a pretty complicated business. The complexity of the modern scientific process seems to be a reflection of the intricacies of life and the processes associated with disease and its treatment. Furthermore, as technologies become more advanced, so too does the problem of managing the ever expanding quantity of data being generated.

Currently, pharmaceutical companies expend significant and duplicated efforts aligning and integrating their internal information with public data sources. This process is largely incompatible with large-scale computational approaches and the vast majority of drug discovery sources find it difficult to complicate with eachother. more…

BioMed Central have launched a free Cases Database that allows clinicians, researchers, teachers and patients to explore peer-reviewed medical case reports from multiple journal publishers (including BMJ Group, BioMed Central and Springer). The database is freely accessible and contains 11627 cases from 100 different journals.

It is hoped that bringing together so many case reports will encourage the identification of trends and patterns, thereby providing researchers with hypotheses for further systematic research.

The database offers structured search and filtering by condition, symptom, intervention, pathogen, patient demographic and many other data fields, allowing fast identification of relevant case reports to support clinical practice and research.

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