Stanford University

Bone marrow stem cells may provide a way to target and treat inactive tuberculosis, which can hide in the body and emerge later on down the road, well after aggressive drug therapy.

Dr. Atul Butte is pioneering efforts from his lab at Stanford and via a startup called NuMedii--which is led by his wife, Gini Deshpande--to mine massive data sets for breakthrough diagnostics and treatments.

Today, doctors ask patients to rate their own pain on a scale, relying heavily on what patients say to make their diagnoses. Stanford researchers are working on a more objective measurement, and they have applied computer algorithms to help them pull it off.

Stanford University has won approval for a genomics center that will compete with MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute for funding and talent, The Stanford Daily reported. The West Coast rival will be explicitly focused on analyzing Big Data, those incredibly large and fast-growing data sets that scientists are investigating to solve mysteries about human biology and other complex fields.

Any regular reader of FierceBiotech knows just how rare it is for a promising drug that produced stellar results in small early studies to march all the way through the clinic without losing its luster or getting snuffed out by an adverse event or lackluster results. Now there's an in-depth trial review that shows clearly just how bad the odds of continued success are.

News that Japanese scientists successfully used mice stem cells to create eggs and then fertilized them to produce baby mice is a big enough breakthrough, representing the first successful use of stem cells to create a mammal. A team at Stanford University aims to take this even further, however, and create healthy human sperm from stem cells.