Mark2Cure featured in TSRI's News & Views

I have to hand it to the communications office at TSRI, they have some great writers.

TSRI Team Comes Together with Rare Disease Community

By Madeline McCurry-Schmidt

Don’t worry, science fiction fans, the machines aren’t taking over quite yet. It turns out humans still beat computers at reading and comprehending text.

In fact, your ability to read this very sentence means you could join a new project led by researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Volunteers in their online program, Mark2Cure, read sections of scientific studies to identify important terms.

“If you can read, you can help,” explained TSRI Associate Professor Andrew Su, leader of Mark2Cure, in a presentation at Stanford University’s recent Big Data in Biomedicine 2015 conference.

With about 1 million biomedical studies published every year, it’s impossible for scientists to keep track of all new developments. Search engines can track down specific words and phrases, but they can fail to find the obvious (to the human brain) connections between terms such as “disorders of metabolism” and “metabolic disorders.”

Now, Mark2Cure volunteers, called Mark2Curators, are on the job, sorting through studies to find the needles in the haystacks. Their work could point to new therapies for rare but devastating diseases….

See the complete article here and don’t forget to join the effort.