• Mayo Clinic Embarks on Population-Scale Pharmacogenomics Study

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has announced plans to sequence genes from 10,000 patients for genetic variants that could affect their responses to a variety of medications, as part of a study that will track the long-term health outcomes of patients who undergo pharmacogenetic testing.

    May 14, 2015

  • Genentech Brain Trust Raises $217m For New Startup To Fight Alzheimers And Parkinsons

    Forbes | Three former top researchers at Genentech, the legendary biotech that is now part of Roche Holding, have raised $217 million in venture capital to start a new company, Denali Therapeutics, focused on treating and curing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS, and Parkinson's.

    May 14, 2015

  • Allen Institute Debuts Neuron Periodic Table

    Xconomy | With the Allen Cell Types Database, the Allen Institute for Brain Science aims to catalog and classify the types of neurons that fill the brain.

    May 14, 2015

  • Citizen Science in the Unexplored Terrain of the Brain

    Bio-IT World | To understand how neural circuits give rise to complex mental phenomena, neuroscientists need detailed maps of brain cells in their natural environment. With an online game called EyeWire, one group of researchers is enlisting thousands of ordinary people to do what the best artificial intelligence cannot: turn huge numbers of electron microscope images of the retina into accurate, three-dimensional models of neurons as they appear in living tissue.

    May 13, 2015

  • Cleversafe Joins iRODS Consortium

    Bio-IT World | Cleversafe, a private cloud platform, announced today that it has joined the iRODS Consortium, a membership-based foundation organized to sustain the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software. 

    May 12, 2015

  • Jennifer Doudna a Pioneer Who Helped Simplify Genome Editing

    New York Times | The biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make a monumental discovery: a relatively simple way to alter any organism's DNA. But she is stuck in a patent fight over it.

    May 11, 2015

  • Looking Forward to the Clinical Genome Conference

    Bio-IT World | CHI’s Clinical Genome Conference (TCGC) always offers a packed schedule of talks at the cutting edge of medical genomics. With a program once again pushing the envelope of where genomics and medicine will take us in the coming year, we aren’t expecting much down time over the three event days, though we always work in at least one trip out of San Francisco’s Japantown for Burmese tea leaf salad. Here’s what else we are looking forward to on the TCGC menu.

    May 7, 2015

  • PacBio, RainDance to Co-Develop De Novo Whole Genome Assembly Product

    Bio-IT World News Briefs | Pacific Biosciences and RainDance Technologies yesterday announced a co-development and co-marketing agreement to commercialize novel solutions for de novo whole genome assembly.

    May 6, 2015

  • Apple Pursues DNA Data

    MIT Technology Review | Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans. The apps are based on ResearchKit.

    May 6, 2015

  • IBM Announces Watson Genomic Analytics; Collaborations with 14 Cancer Centers

    Bio-IT World | IBM Watson made a series of announcements today at World of Watson, a symposium IBM is hosting in New York. In opening remarks, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty highlighted Watson Genomic Analytics; introduced collaborations with 14 leading cancer centers to use the solution to scale precision oncology; and announced a partnership with Epic to integrate Watson into EHR systems.

    May 5, 2015

  • Phil Bourne: Open Data Evangelist on NIH Data Plan

    Bio-IT World | Before we get ahead of ourselves, Philip Bourne, Associate Director of Data Science at NIH, emphasized that in the 6D framework of patient-centered health, we are still mired in “deception”—step two—and haven’t yet reached disruption. Democratization is still far on the horizon.

    May 4, 2015

  • Amazon Buys ClusterK

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Yesterday, Amazon acquired ClusterK, a start up Bio-IT World covered in February for between $20 and $50 million, Venture Beat reported.

    Apr 30, 2015

  • WuXi NextCODE, DNAnexus Launch End-to-End Sequencing in China and Beyond

    Bio-IT World | Last week during the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, WuXi NextCODE and DNAnexus announced a strategic alliance to accelerate genomics worldwide.

    Apr 30, 2015

  • Industry Experts on Designing Research Platforms to Serve Patient Participants

    Bio-IT World | A keynote panel at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, featuring representatives from PatientsLikeMe, the Empowered Genome Community, and the Open Medicine Institute, addressed ways to make research meaningful for the patient participants who want to share their data and experiences with science.

    Apr 29, 2015

  • Illumina Pursues a $20B Market

    Forbes | Illumina, one of the most important companies in biomedicine, is still barely known to the public. But scientists, diagnostics makers, physicians, and Wall Street look at the company with a mix of fear and awe. Just as Intel became the company that sparked so much of the computer revolution, Illumina is driving the genomics revolution.

    Apr 29, 2015

  • New Projects for Pistoia

    Bio-IT World | Contributed Report | ZURICH--Early arrivals at the Pistoia Alliance Annual European Conference were able to enjoy the local festival of Sächsilüüte whereby a snowman (the Böögg, literally translated as the bogeyman) is packed with fireworks and placed atop a lit bonfire. The less time it takes for its head to explode, the better the summer will be. Although not usually so spectacularly explosive, the life sciences industry is certainly feeling the heat at present as technology develops rapidly and commercial pressures increase. The goal is to avoid a similar fate to that of the unfortunate Böögg.  

    Apr 28, 2015

  • Bio-IT World Recognizes 2015 Best of Show Winners

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World announced the 2015 winners of the Best of Show Awards Program last Wednesday to a packed audience at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. The awards program recognizes the best of the innovative product solutions for the life sciences industry on display at the Bio-IT World conference in Boston.

    Apr 27, 2015

  • April News From the Bio-IT World Conference and Around the Industry

    Bio-IT World | News and product briefs from the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo and more. WuXi NextCODE moves to the DNAnexus cloud, Apple makes its ResearchKit development platform open source, and Seven Bridges Genomics integrates with Station X.

    Apr 27, 2015

  • Chris Sander at Bio-IT World

    Bio-IT World | Chris Sander, chair of the Computational Biology Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, delivered a keynote address this week at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.

    Apr 23, 2015

  • Owen White Receives 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award at Bio-IT World Conference

    Bio-IT World | At the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston, Bioinformatics.org President Jeff Bizzaro presented the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences to Owen White, who leads the bioinformatics department at the University of Maryland Institute of Genome Sciences and manages the Data Analysis and Coordination Center for the Human Microbiome Project.

    Apr 22, 2015