Subject Code/Name: BIOM30002: Biomedicine: Molecule to MaladyWorkload: - Contact hours: three 1-hour lectures per week plus two 1-hour tutorials per semester.
- Total time commitment: 170 hours
A word on the tutorials: the handbook is a bit misleading. Essentially, this subject relies on having six lectures for each of the six modules, so the tutorial timeslot has been timetabled in to account for any loss of lessons, whether that be due to a public holiday or in allowance of a lecturer going overtime. Most weeks, the tutorial timeslot seemed to run for one reason or another: there was one non-examinable tutorial, but otherwise these were used for module summaries, mid-semester test reviews or sometimes a patient interview. Note that the tutorial time may actually be assigned to deliver a lecture with another one of the timetabled lecture timeslots being designated for tutorial purposes.
In any case, you will have 36 lectures for this subject.
Assessment: 2 x 45min intra-semester tests (20% each) around weeks 6 and 10; 3 hr written examination in the final examination period (60%).
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture.
Past exams available: No. However, questions are available for revision. At the end of each week feedback quizzes are released, delivering some fairly basic but important questions to review the week's content. Prior to the mid-semester tests and the exam, multiple choice quizzes containing previous year's questions are provided. This year for the first time a handful of short answer questions were also released in order to prepare for the exam. You should get adequate practice through these.
Textbook Recommendation: None. It is anticipated that students will access standard reference texts on anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry & molecular biology, microbiology & immunology, pharmacology and clinical medicine. Key references and review articles will be provided via the LMS.
The review articles are provided due to the fact that there is no textbook for this subject. I never read them, so they are not directly examinable.
To supplement any areas of uncertainty, a frequently asked questions page is put up on the LMS with lecturers providing detailed responses to student questions. I often found these contained superfluous information that was beyond the scope of the course, so use them as you see fit.
Lecturer(s):Co-ordinators (do not provide lectures but are responsible for the co-ordination of the subject):
- Mrs Helen Cain
- Assoc Prof Fred Hollande
- Prof Dick Strugnell
I think we saw Fred and Dick at the very first lecture and that was it, so I'm pretty sure they do a lot of work behind the scenes. You'll see Helen every lecture though; she sits through each lecture to ensure all the guest lecturers know what they're doing and also as a means of quality control. She's probably the person to contact if you have any problems.
Lecturers:
Module 1: Pandemics
- Prof Sharon Lewin: HIV (3 lectures)
- Prof James Beeson: malaria pathogenesis (2 lectures)
- Dr Rick Ataide: malaria treatment (1 lecture)
- Dr Justin Denholm: ethics in pandemics (non-examinable tutorial)
Module 2: Muscular dystrophy
- Prof Monique Ryan: review of muscle physiology (1 lecture)
- Dr Eppie Yiu: muscular dystrophy (5 lectures)
Module 3: B cells and associated diseases
- Prof David Tarlinton (6 lectures)
Module 4: Cystic fibrosis
- Prof Sylvia Metcalfe: clinical genetics of cystic fibrosis (3 lectures)
- Dr Joanne Harrison: clinical presentation and management of cystic fibrosis (3 lectures)
Module 5: Neurodegeneration
- Prof Malcolm Horne: introduction to neurodegeneration (1 lecture)
- Prof Roberto Cappai: Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease (5 lectures)
Module 6: Rheumatoid arthritis
- Dr John Moi: clinical presentation and management of rheumatoid arthritis (4 lectures)
- Dr Nicole Walsh: molecular basis of synovial and bone pathology in rheumatoid arthritis (2 lectures)
Some of these are clinicians while others are researchers. Regardless, you will be exposed to a variety of very interesting and unique insights to each of these topics throughout the semester.
Year & Semester of completion: Semester 1, 2016
Rating: 4.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: H1
Comments: This is probably my favourite Biomedicine core subject to date (and most likely for the entire degree, given how the reviews for BIOM30001 Frontiers in Biomedicine read). It's the first subject where you start to get a bit of a clinical feel to the world of biomedicine. This is achieved through the patient interviews (a highlight of the subject) but also in the nature of the content, which spends a lot of time on clinical presentation and management. Given that many in the course are aspiring for clinical pathways, I think a lot of people really enjoyed it.
A lot of people like to draw comparisons with this subject and BIOM20001 Molecular and Cellular Biomedicine; personally, I preferred this subject because as a 12.5 credit point subject the workload felt a lot more manageable. I'd also say the general concepts are much easier in this subject; this is supported by the fact that this subject had lower fail rates than BIOM20001 for both mid-semester tests (only about 4% of people failed in each case, compared to about 10% for our cohort in BIOM20001). However, doing well is a lot more difficult. Personally, based on my performance in assessments, my marks fell and I'm not confident on the H1, and the proportion of students attaining H1 in this subject is much lower compared to other second and third year biomedical science subjects (it hovers around 30% compared to 40%+). This is because the assessment is of an incredibly high quality (i.e. a lot of effort is put in to creating good distractors in the multiple choice assessments), but also, due to the nature of the content. In BIOM20001 the concepts are, in my opinion, more involved and difficult, and you have to put more work into understanding them, but once you know it, there are no surprises. In comparison, in this subject it's really easy for the concepts to just make sense (for example is easy to generalise that the proximal limb muscles are implicated in Duchenne muscular dystrophy) so you kind of accept them as having been memorised, only to realise in the assessment that they're really trying to focus on the small details (like the exact progression of specific muscles and comparing and contrasting which muscles are involved in different diseases). It's difficult to say how to manage this other than to review regularly. I think most people's marks fell in one way or another.
With co-ordination by Helen, this subject was always going to be extremely well run. The deduction of half a point in my score is simply me being picky about a couple of bumps along the way in regards to timetabling, clashes and one particular module which didn't exactly go to plan this year (I won't say it out of respect for the staff involved). Assessments had to be moved to early morning timeslots because many of the third year biomedical subjects (stupidly, in my opinion) clashed their assessments at the same time, making things rather difficult for us. I kind of wish subject timetabling would be better run at the university's end, because my timetable was pretty horrendous this semester. This subject had a lot of early morning and late afternoon lectures for us; it was frustrating but at the same time when you have doctors working in the field I guess you have to allow for their day jobs. Otherwise, despite the fact that so many new and different lecturers come in, the subject felt really cohesive and well-organised.
The patient interviews were definitely the best part of this subject. They were either run in tutorial timeslots or were designated time in one of the six core lectures for each module. Every module except B cell diseases had a patient interview. These were generally non-examinable although sometimes they clarified your understanding in one way or another. I found it to be a really good reminder of why I was sitting in the lecture theatre working through my degree. I commend the co-ordinators for bringing this initiative into this subject.
I'll spend a bit of time talking about some of the details of each module so that you get a bit of a feel for what they're like. From what I can gather, these six modules have been the same for the entire life of the subject, although their order and the content that is covered changes from year to year (evident in previous subject reviews which seem to describe a different order and also different topics or focus points and from different staff). In all cases, the six lectures are really spent going through the "molecule to malady" concept - understanding why the patient presents the way they do through the underlying molecular pathology, and then using this to guide management principles and devise possible future therapies. The focus this year seemed to be a lot more on the treatment side of things compared to last year, where the subject appeared to deal more with the molecular pathology. For this reason, just be careful if you have any old resources (I mention this because with the lecture capture problems this year we had some old recordings put up, but a lot of them came across as irrelevant to 2016). However, it should be noted that some modules are more "clinical" than others (pandemics, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis) while others have a stronger research focus (B cell diseases and neurodegeneration), with rheumatoid arthritis probably sitting somewhere in the middle, in my opinion.
There's a fair amount of discussion as to whether any majors will assist in studies of BIOM30002 due to overlap of subject content. There seems to be a general consensus that microbiology/immunology and pathology students had a particularly advantageous background; the postulate about pathology makes sense to me (although I hear the core subject isn't so great), but I'm not so sure about microbiology/immunology. A lot of the diseases dealt with do involve inflammation, so there may be a slight advantage, but otherwise I felt that different majors lent themselves to different modules. As a neuroscience major, there was overlap between my major subjects and neurodegeneration, which, for me, made that module a lot easier (many others thought it was the worst module or the most difficult). I also felt I understood muscular dystrophy a bit better, although the physiology students were probably even more familiar than I would've been. Pandemics and B cell diseases obviously lend themselves well to microbiology/immunology students; rheumatoid arthritis would as well although this had a lot of anatomy in it so I think anatomy students would have liked it as well. Cystic fibrosis did have a genetics basis to it but in my eyes it was a bit of an all-rounder. None of this is obviously important; you shouldn't go basing your major and subject selection around trying to complement this subject but I just include it as food for thought.
In terms of how the modules are assessed, the first mid-semester test assesses modules 1 and 2 and the second mid-semester test assesses modules 3 and 4. Each mid-semester test was 45 minutes plus 5 minutes reading time; they had 40 marks from multiple choice questions (20 per module) and were worth 20% of your grade each. As I said earlier, these tests were very high quality and therefore frustratingly difficult. Make sure you know your content well, review regularly and consult the resources for practice. Just as an aside, Helen was an absolute boss this semester, having the results for the first mid-semester test uploaded the very same day we sat it. She will also take you through the general cohort performance in a review lecture, although the subject refrains from discussing the specifics of each question. To help you out, you will receive an email with a breakdown of your marks, which can help guide your study afterwards.
The exam is worth 60% of your grade - it is a 3 hour exam this time (a contrast to most of your exams these days) and has two sections. Section A is essentially the equivalent of a third mid-semester test - 20 multiple choice questions for module 5 and 20 for module 6. Section B is the dreaded short answer section. Here, you pick four modules out of the six to respond to a group of questions in specially-prepared script books. The total marks for one module is 20, so this section is worth 80 marks overall. The 20 marks are split in half such that there is a 'part A' and 'part B' to each module, and within each part there will be a handful of questions to make up the 10 marks total for each part. Unlike BIOM20001, these are proper short answer questions in that they were more open and less targeted (i.e. many of the questions came across as quite general - perhaps a good example would be "describe how you would manage a boy with muscular dystrophy in the clinic" (6 marks)) and I felt you had to write a lot more in response. I guess that means there's also more onus on you to know your detail so that you can show off to the examiners what you know, although it's easy to forget things given the lack of guidance. This style of question exposes my weakness and probably explains why the number of students attaining H1 is a bit lower than usual. I personally aimed to write a well-rounded complete response, incorporating any relevant details I knew in order to try and gain as many marks as possible. The exam is 120 marks total, so in terms of time per mark the assessment is theoretically less time-pressured than the mid-semester tests, but short answer questions do eat up your time. In the end, I only just finished and that involved me completing the multiple choice questions in only 30 minutes. A fair number of people didn't complete the exam on time. I hope I explained the format well - I have a feeling I haven't, but don't stress because it will be explained to you sometime in a lecture. To sum up, the multiple choice component of the exam is worth 20% of your grade, while the short answer section is worth 40%.
If you're thinking strategically, you might notice that you may not have to study each module for the exam, and that is indeed correct. In any case, you must learn the last two modules as they will be assessed in the multiple choice section. Otherwise, you can choose how you feel like tackling section B of the exam. In all honesty, it really depends on the person and also how your exam timetable falls. I had a week between my previous exam and this one, so I chose to study for five modules. I personally didn't enjoy B cell diseases at all, so after the mid-semester test I had immediately decided to let it go by the wayside. My favourite modules were muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and neurodegeneration, so I was definitely going to do those (and I did) but I was a bit torn between pandemics and rheumatoid arthritis. I had to study rheumatoid arthritis anyway, but as I'll discuss later I'd say objectively it was the most difficult module; hence I thought studying pandemics might be a good idea as a backup (and it indeed was, as I thought the questions were especially accessible for this module this year). I would probably not recommend only studying four modules as this leaves you with no backup in case you don't like the set of questions; and for me studying for all six modules didn't seem like the most effective use of my time. In the end it's all up to you.
Since I was too lazy to actually write out responses in preparation for this exam, instead I came up with a question bank of about 10-15 questions per module as I was working through them, and then brainstormed and planned out my answers to them during SWOTVAC. I personally felt this worked quite well as I was able to test my recall and make corrections and fill in any gaps in my answer, but it also allowed me to pull various concepts together in the highly likely chance that the questions that I had made were different to the ones on the exam. In any case, you will need to work on recall as recognition of a correct response is a technique that probably only works for multiple choice questions (maybe a smaller and more guided short answer question).
Now a brief discussion on the content of each module. Our first module this year was pandemics - HIV and malaria. I really enjoyed Sharon's HIV lectures and I thought she was a good lecturer. There's a lot of content to work through but I felt she did a good job of getting us through it and giving us a different perspective to the HIV pandemic (as you'd know you inevitably come across HIV in one way or another but I felt the perspective in BIOM30002 was unique). I was less keen on malaria but I think it was easier conceptually. In both cases there was a really big focus on the treatment side of things.
Muscular dystrophy has to take it out as being my favourite module largely out of the lecturing by Eppie. The opening lecture by Monique is simply revising your understanding and is not worth exploring in much detail as Eppie's content is the crux of this module. As a clinical neurologist at the Royal Children's Hospital, I absolutely loved her approach the the module. She does speak rather quickly but I thought the slides were thorough and comprehensive, and she explains the content very well.
As I said earlier, I did not enjoy B cell diseases. I think I've started to realise that perhaps immunology just isn't my thing - this module obviously had a lot of immunology in it. My microbiology/immunology friends thought this module was the easiest, but I just found it dry and very difficult to get on top of. I think I found it a bit difficult to figure out what to know. This was exacerbated by the strong research side to this module rather than a clinical focus in the other modules. In the end it's not impossible but after the mid-semester test I was happy to let this module go.
Cystic fibrosis was my second favourite module and in my opinion it was run in a very similar light to muscular dystrophy, with clinical physicians spending a lot of time on the clinical aspect of the disease. Having had Sylvia from UNIB20007 Genetics, Health and Society I knew that when she told us a particular slide was important, she was going to examine it, and this turned out to be the exact case in both the mid-semester test and the exam. Both lecturers worked through their content thoroughly and at an appropriate pace, and again I thought the slides were sufficiently comprehensive.
I was already familiar with some of the neurodegeneration content as a student taking the neuroscience major, although this subject delved into a lot more detail. Rather fortuitously, I happened to be learning about Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease (albeit much more briefly) in NEUR30003 Principles of Neuroscience and NEUR30002 Neurophysiology: Neurons and Circuits at the same time this module began. I'm not sure if that had been organised deliberately or not, but it was definitely a help in all three subjects. Like much of neuroscience, much still needs to be learnt in this area, making it frustrating for students when there are so many grey areas. I was personally used to it, and I also don't mind working with uncertainty in biomedical science, so this didn't phase me, but I know a lot of people didn't enjoy it for that reason. There's not much point talking about Malcolm's introductory lecture other than to say that it provides a bit of a structural framework for tackling the other five lectures given by Roberto. Otherwise, I thought Roberto handled the topics very well, in spite of the lack of concrete understanding. Note that this module includes an "interactive" lecture on treatment for Alzheimer's disease in which you are asked to read a journal article and then propose, using your knowledge of the molecular basis of the disease, some ways that scientists could target a therapeutic. I personally thought this lecture "failed" in its intent, although other people like it, so go figure. The slides were made available after the lecture so my recommendation would be to wait until that point and then watch the lecture as per usual.
Rheumatoid arthritis, in my most objective opinion, had the most difficult content, but I have to say that I didn't mind it (which I guess is something, given it's a mix of immunology and also anatomy - two weaker points for me). John speaks very fast and almost sounds like he's memorised the slides, and given they are a bit brief, you may have to re-watch parts to make sure you can write down everything he says. Nicole worked much slower and her slides were far more comprehensive, although there was a lot more content and conceptual difficulty that needed to be worked through. I'd probably say this module had the greatest workload associated with it compared to the others.
To summarise, I'd say that this is the sort of subject that could really make you stressed and get the better of you if you really focus on trying to score that perfect H1. I think the best way to approach it is to appreciate the journey, because this subject is incredibly unique in it's approach and it's very well-organised. I know that's easier said than done with applications for other pathways looming. Most people seem to experience a slump in their marks, so I'm not sure if accepting that as a likely outcome is a good idea. I feel I gained a really interesting perspective on the world of biomedical science as a result of this subject; it reminded me why I was here and it's started to confirm in me that this is indeed the path I want to go down. If you have any queries, please feel free to contact me. Enjoy the subject for what it's worth, and good luck with the assessment!