• A Worthy Sequel: PacBio's New Sequencing System

    Bio-IT World | Pacific Biosciences has released a new genome sequencing instrument, the Sequel — providing the first-in-class whole genome assemblies of its predecessor the RS II, but much faster and at half the cost. But the company's underlying problems, pitching high quality in a price-sensitive market, are not much changed.

    Oct 1, 2015

  • With $55M Neon Wants To Make the Cancer Vaccine Problem Personal

    Xconomy | Neon Therapeutics hopes to harness the body's immune system against the genetic fingerprints of tumors, creating a new kind of cancer vaccine.

    Oct 1, 2015

  • September News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product releases from around the industry, including results from a study on Apple's ResearchKit, and population-scale genome analytics from GENALICE.

    Sep 30, 2015

  • How People Living at Earth's Extremes Reveal the Genome's Best Tricks

    The Atlantic | Evolution has sculpted the human genome to cope with Earth's toughest climates, inadvertently pointing geneticists towards medically important genes.

    Sep 30, 2015

  • Speed Heals: The 26-Hour Diagnostic Genome

    Bio-IT World | Stephen Kingsmore and his colleagues at the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, announced 26-hour diagnostic whole genome sequencing in a paper published today in Genomic Medicine, an improvement over the 50-hour whole genome sequencing the group published in 2012. The paper is published just one day after Kingsmore took his new post as President and CEO of the Rady Pediatric Genomics and Systems Medicine Institute at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.

    Sep 29, 2015

  • Drug Pricing Fears Erase Biotech Stock Gains for the Year

    The Street | Anger over a price hike at Turing Pharmaceuticals and a Congressional letter to Valeant have dealt a blow to biotech stocks that many observers already fretted were sharply overvalued.

    Sep 29, 2015

  • Tour of the Cloud: Emerald Cloud Labs’ Hardware and Software Vision

    Bio-IT World | Emerald Cloud Labs' robotics facility for programmable scientific experiments is up and running in South San Francisco, as Bio-IT World editor Allison Proffitt reports from inside the lab.

    Sep 24, 2015

  • FDA Turns Its Eye on Pathway's 'Direct-to-Consumer' Cancer Test

    Diagnostics World | This Thursday, the FDA sent a letter to Pathway Genomics warning the company that a newly introduced test, a liquid biopsy to find early-stage cancer in apparently healthy people, has not been clinically validated and could be harmful to public health. The letter not only calls attention to the shaky evidence for this test's accuracy, but also asserts the FDA's authority over a whole category of tests in a regulatory gray area.

    Sep 25, 2015

  • Farewell Nabsys

    Omics! Omics! Blog | Nabsys and its all-electronic single molecule physical mapping approach closed its doors a little over a week ago.

    Sep 25, 2015

  • Bring your companys dark data to light with this free new tool from Tamr

    Computerworld | Tamr's enterprise metadata catalog can help companies create an inventory of their data sources, including metadata about who owns the source.

    Sep 24, 2015

  • IBM to open San Francisco office dedicated to Watson supercomputing

    Fortune | IBM plans to open a new San Francisco office next year dedicated to growing its Watson supercomputing business. The location will give IBM direct access to the Bay Area startups.

    Sep 24, 2015

  • Venter's HLI Opens Genome Sequencing Service

    San Diego Union-Tribune | Craig Venter's latest company, Human Longevity, Inc., has announced a partnership with health insurer Discovery Ltd. of the U.K. and South Africa to offer patients whole exome sequencing for $250, a service Venter hopes to extend to the U.S.

    Sep 23, 2015

  • Garvan Institute Uses Panasas System for X Ten

    Bio-IT World  | The Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney was one of the first three groups to sign up for Illumina’s HiSeq X Ten sequencing platform in 2014, a system that produced up to 5TB of data per day. To enable round the clock computing with as little down time as possible, the Institute opted for the Panasas PanFS parallel file system.

    Sep 21, 2015

  • British Scientists Seek Permission To Edit DNA In Human Embryos

    NPR.org | After Chinese scientists announced in April that they had edited the genes in human embryos, many researchers said it shouldn't be done. Scientists in London say they want to do it for research only.

    Sep 18, 2015

  • Under the Hood with Edico’s DRAGEN Card at HudsonAlpha

    Bio-IT World | Two weeks before Edico was ready to go public, Shawn Levy of HudsonAlpha was happily telling us of his expereince with Edico's DRAGEN card, a bio-IT processor that claims to massively accelerate secondary analysis algorithms while simultaneously improving accuracy. Levy calls it--in a word--amazing.

    Sep 18, 2015

  • Long-lived Smokers: A ‘Biologically Distinct’ Group with Extraordinary Gene Variants

    Washington Post | Researchers say they've identified a set of genetic variants that may here is evidence that these genes may facilitate lifespan extension by increasing cellular maintenance and repair.

    Sep 16, 2015

  • Head of Mental Health Institute Leaving for Google Life Sciences

    The New York Times | Dr. Thomas R. Insel announced that he is stepping down after 13 years as director of the National Institute of Mental Health to join Google Life Sciences.

    Sep 15, 2015

  • Imprecision Medicine: Eric Dishman Kicked Off the Converged IT Summit

    Bio-IT World Eric Dishman, an Intel Fellow and general manager of the Health and Life Sciences for the Data Center Group, shared his own precision medicine story at the inaugural Converged IT Summit* co-hosted by the BioTeam and Cambridge Healthtech Institute, setting the tone for a two-day look at trends from the trenches of IT and life sciences discovery.

    Sep 15, 2015

  • Gene Therapy Startup Dimension Tx Takes Crossover Cash to IPO Queue

    Xconomy | Time to add one more recipient of crossover investor cash to the list of official IPO candidates. Cambridge, MA-based Dimension Therapeutics just filed for an IPO this morning to raise money to build gene therapies for rare diseases.

    Sep 14, 2015

  • HudsonAlpha, Kailos Genetics, and a Plan for Population-Wide BRCA Screening

    Diagnostics World | In a large pilot initiative with little precedent, HudsonAlpha and its genetic testing spinoff Kailos plan to offer free or steeply discounted genetic screens for susceptibility to breast cancer to thousands of women in the area of Huntsville, Alabama, including women with no known risk factors for the disease.

    Sep 9, 2015