• 21st Century Cures Act Passes House Now Must Navigate Senate

    Xconomy | The U.S. House of Representatives took a big step this morning toward major changes in the federal government's relationship to biomedical research, funding and regulation.

    Jul 10, 2015

  • Pistoia Alliance Launches Startup Challenge

    Bio-IT World | The Pistoia Alliance has launched a business plan contest that will ask startup companies from around the world to develop new ideas to lower the barriers to innovation in life sciences R&D. The Pistoia Alliance President’s Startup Challenge 2015 invites small and medium enterprises to compete for cash prizes and expert mentorship from a senior industry figure drawn from the Pistoia Alliance membership.

    Jul 9, 2015

  • Sequencing the genome creates so much data we don’t know what to do with it

    Washington Post | Scientists say genomics will end up being the biggest data hog, set to surpass astronomy, particle physics -- even YouTube.

    Jul 8, 2015

  • GlaxoSmithKline Searching For Hit Drugs Pours $95M Into DNA Dark Matter

    Forbes | GlaxoSmithKline is investing $95 million in a nonprofit research center in Seattle called the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, focusing on the "dark matter" of the genome.

    Jul 8, 2015

  • HealthSeq Study Offers Healthy New Yorkers Whole Genome Sequencing

    Bio-IT World | Following on studies like ClinSeq and MedSeq, Mount Sinai School of Medicine's HealthSeq project is tracking patient responses to genome-wide testing, in an effort to extend these studies to a more diverse population and include non-health-related results like ancestry and physical trait information.

    Jul 7, 2015

  • Grappling with Genomic Sequencing of Newborns

    MIT Technology Review | The BabySeq project in Boston has begun collecting data to quantify the risks and benefits of DNA sequencing at birth.

    Jul 2, 2015

  • June News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product briefs from around the industry, including landmarks on the second anniversary of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, and the commercial launch of 10X Genomics' GemCode platform.

    Jul 1, 2015

  • Clone-Free, Single-Molecule Genome Assembly Illuminates Structural Variation

    Bio-IT World | A large collaboration led by scientists at the Icahn Institute has combined PacBio sequencing and BioNano optical maps to produce the most contiguous human genome ever assembled without cloning steps, bringing a new degree of resolution to studies of complex structural variants.

    Jun 30, 2015

  • Celgene To Pay $1B For A Big Piece of Juno and T Cell Therapies

    Xconomy | It seemed only a matter of time. One of biotech's most aggressive deal makers, Celgene has struck a wide-ranging, billion-dollar partnership with Juno Therapeutics.

    Jun 30, 2015

  • #TCGC15: Databases, Genomics, and Making Clinical Sequencing Work

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The fourth annual Clinical Genome Conference wrapped up last week in San Francisco. It was a packed three days of short courses, presentations, and discussion that spilled over the time slots and into the evening. Thankfully, much of it ended up on Twitter.

    Jun 29, 2015

  • 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