Open access publisher BioMed Central has announced the winners of its 8th Annual Research Award at the Metabolism, Diet and Disease: Cancer and metabolism conference at the Georgetown University Hotel and conference center, Washington DC.
The awards honour the very best research published in one of BioMed Central's 250 plus open access journals in 2013. The overall BioMed Central Research Award, supported by antibodies-online.com, was selected from a shortlist consisting of the winners of ten subject categories.
The overall winners include Ellen Heitzer and Michael Speicher from the Medical University of Graz, Austria, and their fellow researchers, for their article investigating markers of prostate cancer, published in Genome Medicine.
Heitzer and Speicher's research focuses on cancer; specifically the hunt for mutations in tumor genomes. Accolades came for the improvements they made to methods involving sequencing DNA from easily accessible fluids; the 'liquid-biopsy approach' rather than taking a tumor biopsy. Using a benchtop high-throughput sequencing instrument the team was able to examine the DNA circulating in the plasma of cancer patients more rapidly and cheaply than previous studies without compromising accuracy. Their research is particularly focused on prostate cancer, the sixth leading cause of cancer-related death in men worldwide.
