Scientists from Columbia have found what scorpion venoms are good for. And they are gladly sharing this with us.
Nicholoas Tatonetti, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia, and a graduate student Joseph Romano made everybody know that they are revealing their open-access database on all things venom, called VenomKB.
Even though venoms are usually known for its toxic effects on human and have always gotten a bad rap for their less friendly approach on strangers, experts have always known about their possible benefits that they can give to us humans. However, it is still an unused potential so Tatonetti and Romano made a database to be able to bring together the most updated information about venoms in every aspect of medicine possible.
In a statement released by Columbia, Tatonetti explained how this list will help release information about venoms and its therapeutic effects. He said that the only thing they needed to address was how they can use the information with other databases to new compounds and therapies.
Coming up with this project was by no means a walk in the park. The two experts dug into MEDLINE, a publicly-accessible database of scientific articles on almost all research connected with biology and medicine. MEDLINE has approximately 22million papers at the time.
With the help of computer formulas, they then narrowed down their choices to over 5,000 studies on venom therapies totaling to over 42,723 of detailed explanation on the unique effects of venom on the human body. After that, they manually made a summary for the first 275 venom studies they finished with links to the actual study. The order was arranged in random for them to avoid unfairness.
In addition to the personally researched aspect of VenomKB, the researchers also made two additional automated functions that will permit users to search for any specific physical effect or venom mixture they want. It is the researchers hope that as time passes, the algorithms that control the automated database will improve, with the help of contributors, so that they false positive readings will be avoided.
