Incidence and associations of acute kidney injury after major abdominal surgery

MO’C is a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Academic Clinical Fellow in Intensive Care Medicine. RMP is the recipient of an NIHR Research Professorship

Utilizing Electronic Health Records to Predict Acute Kidney Injury Risk and Outcomes: Workgroup Statements from the 15 th

The data contained within the electronic health record (EHR) is “big” from the standpoint of volume, velocity, and variety. These circumstances and the pervasive trend towards EHR adoption have sparked interest in applying big data predictive analytic techniques to EHR data. Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a condition well suited to prediction and risk forecasting; not only does the consensus definition for AKI allow temporal anchoring of events, but no treatments exist once AKI develops, underscoring the importance of early identification and prevention. The Acute Dialysis Quality Initiative (ADQI) convened a group of key opinion leaders and stakeholders to consider how best to approach AKI research and care in the “Big Data” era. This manuscript addresses the core elements of AKI risk prediction and outlines potential pathways and processes. We describe AKI prediction targets, feature selection, model development, and data display

SeaBioTech: From Seabed to Test-Bed: Harvesting the Potential of Marine Biodiversity for Industrial Biotechnology

SeaBioTech is an EU-FP7 project designed and driven by SMEs to create innovative marine biodiscovery pipelines as a means to convert the potential of marine biotechnology into novel industrial products for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, aquaculture, functional food and industrial chemistry sectors. To achieve its goals, SeaBioTech brings together leading experts in biology, genomics, natural product chemistry, bioactivity testing, industrial bioprocessing, legal aspects, market analysis and knowledge exchange. SeaBioTech targets novel marine endosymbiotic bacteria from unique and previously untapped habitats, including geothermal intertidal biotopes in Iceland, hydrothermal vent fields and deep-sea oligotrophic basins of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and underexplored areas of Scottish coasts that are likely to be highly productive sources of new bioactive compounds. This chapter describes the 4 years of activity in the SeaBioTech project, which resulted in a robust, validated workflow suitable for evaluating unexplored activities in marine samples to prioritize potential products for a biotechnological pipeline. An improved integrated methodology involving metagenomics and metabolomics was extensively utilized to prioritize five extremophiles as potential antibiotics, anticancer drugs and novel drugs against metabolic diseases as well as new pharmaceutical excipients to the pipeline. A centralized biobank repository, which included a database of information, was established for future bioprospecting activities. For future marine bioprospecting activities, a harmonized legal position was put together in collaboration with other EU-FP7 blue biotechnology projects