• Report from the Festival of Genomics

    Bio-IT World | A new event held this week in Boston, the Festival of Genomics, aimed to engage the public with this burgeoning science, while emphasizing to scientists the importance of data sharing and of integrating DNA data with meaningful health information in order to deliver on the promises of genomic medicine.

    Jun 26, 2015

  • Mount Sinai Announces Precision Wellness Center

    Bio-IT World | The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today announced the Harris Center for Precision Wellness. The center is part of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and will be directed by Joel Dudley of the Icahn Institute and Gregory Stock, formerly of UCLA.

    Jun 25, 2015

  • Google Genomics, Broad Partner, Offer GATK on Google Cloud Platform

    Bio-IT World News Brief | This morning Google Genomics announced a partnership with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to, “combine the power, security, and scale of Google Cloud Platform with Broad Institute’s expertise in scientific analysis.” The first offering will be the GATK on Google Cloud Platform. 

    Jun 24, 2015

  • Duplications in Figures, Data in Oncology Journals

    In the Pipeline | Here's a disturbing read for you: the author of this paper (Morten Oksvold, of Oslo University) sat down and did what none of us ever do. He chose three different journals in the oncology field, picked one hundred and twenty papers, at random, from their recent issues, and carefully looked every one of them over for duplications in the figures and data. On PubPeer, you can see what he found. Nearly a quarter of the papers had problems.

    Jun 23, 2015

  • A Colorful Business

    Diagnostics World | Color Genomics is just one of several companies toying with a new model for selling low-priced DNA tests online, by enlisting physicians as intermediaries. If Color's business model becomes popular, it will have big implications for the way genomic testing reaches the broader public — and who sets the standards for this maturing technology.

    Jun 22, 2015

  • Why Hasn't Big Data Come to Rescue Clinical Data?

    Clinical Informatics News | The cost-to-value equation for standardizing clinical data is broken. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars annually, and substantially delay products’ time to market, sending clinical data to contractors for preparation and integration before analysis. Why is the standardization process for clinical data still manual?

    Jun 19, 2015

  • With Johnson and Johnson, Harvard Spinoff Emulate Unveils New Organs-on-Chips

    Bio-IT World | Emulate, a for-profit spinoff of Harvard's Wyss Institute, is announcing that a partnership with Johnson & Johnson has produced a new Thrombosis-on-Chip model for testing drug candidates and studying the biology of blood clotting, in a preview of the company's model for creating and disseminating next-generation organs-on-chips.

    Jun 18, 2015

  • Juno's T-Cell Immunotherapy Cure for Cancer

    MIT Technology Review | Supercharge your immune cells to defeat cancer? Juno Therapeutics believes its treatments can do exactly that.

    Jun 18, 2015

  • Googles data centers grow so fast it has to build its own networks

    Computerworld | Google has been building its own software-defined data-center networks for 10 years because traditional gear can't handle the scale of its warehouse-sized computers.

    Jun 18, 2015

  • Tute Genomics Announces Investment Round from Intermountain, Tencent

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Tute Genomics today announced the closing of its Series A1 round of venture capital funding. The company raised over $3.9 million from a strategic group of investors, including Intermountain Healthcare, Healthbox, and China-based Tencent.

    Jun 16, 2015

  • Whole Genome Assembly with Nanopore Data

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Nature Methods has published a paper by researchers at the University of Birmingham and University of Toronto, demonstrating a complete de novo assembly of an E. coli genome using only data from an Oxford Nanopore MinION Sequencer.

    Jun 16, 2015

  • FDA taps PatientsLikeMe to test the waters of social media adverse event reporting

    mobihealthnews | PatientsLikeMe has announced a research partnership with the FDA: The agency will assess the platform's feasibility as a way to generate adverse event reports, which the FDA uses to regulate drugs after their release into the market.

    Jun 16, 2015

  • Matthew Trunnell Joins Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

    Xconomy | Trunnell leaves the Broad to serve as the chief information officer as the biomedical institution moves into an era of deep genomic sequencing.

    Jun 16, 2015

  • Outpouring of Commentary on CRISPR Germline Editing

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A supplementary document to a recent Nature Biotechnology article on the use of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in the human germline offers complete Q&A's with over 20 experts in the field, taking on pressing questions about how and whether this technology can be regulated.

    Jun 10, 2015

  • ClinGen and Lessons for the Precision Medicine Initiative

    Bio-IT World | Heidi Rehm has been involved in ClinGen since its inception and recently published a report on the project in the New England Journal of Medicine. Rehm’s experience with ClinGen will make hers an important voice as the infrastructure needs for a Precision Medicine Initiative are better defined.

    Jun 10, 2015

  • BGI's Industrial Scale Sequencer Challenges Illumina's HiSeq Line

    Bio-IT World | BGI, the Shenzhen-based global genomics corporation, has revealed its first DNA sequencing instrument for worldwide markets, Revolocity: an ultra-high-throughput, fully automated system based on technology developed by BGI's subsidiary Complete Genomics.

    Jun 8, 2015

  • Kickstarter Launched for Social Reader

    Bio-IT World | David Mittelman and his colleagues at N of Everyone today launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund Reader, a mobile and social reading platform to promote conversation and collaboration within science. 

    Jun 8, 2015

  • The Human Virome's Permanent Mark

    Bio-IT World | The human body is host to an astonishing array of viruses, but efforts to study this secretive population have hit technological limitations. At Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, a new blood test is letting researchers look at patients' whole histories of viral infection, using their antibodies as a permanent record.

    Jun 5, 2015

  • Celgene Bluebird Streamline CAR-T Partnership To Fight Myeloma

    Xconomy | The immuno-oncology field is moving fast these days, but the tough-to-treat blood cancer multiple myeloma has not been one of its early targets.

    Jun 4, 2015

  • Business The billion-dollar biotech

    Nature News & Comment | Moderna Therapeutics has big ambitions and a bankroll to match. How a fledgling start-up became one of the most highly valued private drug firms ever.

    Jun 4, 2015