In their book 'Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare', the authors say that most of the global funding of medical research goes into laboratory and animal studies rather than research that is likely to have more relevance to patients [ 19].
He did, however, promise to increase capital expenditure - the money going into the laboratory infrastructure.
Very few bioinformatic predictions are 100% foolproof and this study is aimed at guiding the bench scientist into making more informed decisions before going into the laboratory.
Thomas Fontaine goes into his laboratory lined with shelves of dark green bottles and takes a small vial of a sludgy brown substance from the fridge.
"This machine could go into any laboratory, any department, any company in the world and could be run by just about anybody". It is smaller, faster, cheaper and even more accurate than existing methods.
Then he left us in there to look around while he went into his laboratory.
Laurie Glimcher remembers going into her father's laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) as a child, seeing beakers full of liquids being stirred automatically, and wondering not just what was in them, but what her father would learn from them.
I didn't go into the laboratories, but peered in through the glass in the doors, to see figures in green and red colour-coded outfits working on colour-coded equipment to reduce the risk of cross-contamination between different procedures.
"Medicine is going into that direction, so every hospital, every clinician, every laboratory in the future is going to need people who can interpret those results," she says.
