• California Plants Its Own Stake in National Precision Medicine Effort

    SFGate | Hot on the heels of President Obama's proposal for a nationwide Precision Medicine Initiative, California Governor Jerry Brown has committed $3 million to a California Initiative for Advancing Precision Medicine.

    Apr 15, 2015

  • Arvados Project Looks to New Models of Genomic Data Management

    Bio-IT World | Curoverse, a Boston-based company supporting the open source Arvados project, is opening a public beta of its service, inviting new users to test a platform built from the ground up to store and manage large volumes of complex biomedical data.

    Apr 14, 2015

  • Roche Acquires Circulating Tumor DNA Company

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Roche is at it again. The pharma today acquired CAPP Medical, a genomics research company founded by Stanford University oncologists and industry veterans, to advance the development of technology for cancer screening and monitoring through the detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in blood.

    Apr 13, 2015

  • IBM Announces Deals With Apple Johnson And Johnson And Medtronic In Bid To Transform Health Care

    Forbes | Experts in health care and information technology agree on the future's biggest opportunity: the creation of a new computational model that will link together all of the massive computers that now hold medical information. The question remains: who will build it, and how? IBM is today staking its claim to be [...]

    Apr 13, 2015

  • Cypher Releases Validation Data on CNVs

    Bio-IT World | Cypher Genomics released data last month showing that the company’s Mantis software provided “highly equivalent interpretations” to a panel of genetic counselors when evaluating whether 91 copy number variations (CNVs) detected in non-invasive prenatal testing were pathogenic.

    Apr 10, 2015

  • Open Humans Aims to Be the Social Network for Science Volunteerism

    Bio-IT World | The Open Humans network has launched as a social network to connect research participants with new scientific studies, backing projects like the Harvard Personal Genome Project and American Gut that allow members to own, share, and publicize their own data.

    Apr 9, 2015

  • Microexons In the Autistic Brain

    Bio-IT World | A recent transcriptomic study has revealed that hundreds of proteins have bonus snippets one to nine amino acids in length that are expressed primarily in the brain, altering protein function compared to isoforms elsewhere in the body. In autistic brains, about a third of these snippets are more often skipped.

    Apr 8, 2015

  • What We Are Looking Forward To At #BioIT15

    Bio-IT World | As part of the precision medicine initiative, President Obama proposed a $215 million investment intended to improve how we treat disease and foster health. What’s needed now is the infrastructure to turn data into discovery. This year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo (April 21-23, #BioIT15) will be three days of conversations in 12 tracks around those very challenges.

    Apr 6, 2015

  • Prenatal Screener Natera Grabs $55M Considers Cancer Test

    Xconomy | In the increasingly active genetic testing space, Natera is trying to lead the pack by harnessing its testing capabilities, thanks to a new $55.5 million funding round.

    Apr 6, 2015

  • April News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product briefs from Quest Diagnostics, Personalis, QIAGEN, Qlucore, Berry Genomics, SCIEX, Ancestry, Linguamatics, and much more.

    Apr 3, 2015

  • 2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices Finalists Announced

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World announced finalists in its 2015 Best Practices Award competition this morning. The 25 finalists will compete for seven awards chosen by a panel of expert judges. The winners will be announced during the keynote session at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo on April 22, in Boston.

    Apr 2, 2015

  • New Cas9 Molecule Points the Way to Viral Delivery of CRISPR Systems

    Bio-IT World | A paper published in today's issue of Nature demonstrates that exploring the natural diversity of CRISPR systems could lead the way to new therapeutic tools, as scientists at the Broad Institute successfully edit the genomes of mice using an AAV vector and a new Cas9 molecule derived from Staphylococcus aureus.

    Apr 1, 2015

  • LifeMap Solutions Teams Up with Mount Sinai on Digital Health

    Bio-IT World | This morning, LifeMap Solutions announced the launch of COPD Navigator, a mobile health app for people living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, in a pilot program conducted with Mount Sinai's Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.

    Mar 31, 2015

  • How GitHub Apparently Ended Up In The Crosshairs Of Chinese Hackers

    ReadWrite | It involves dissidents hacking ways around the Great Firewall.

    Mar 31, 2015

  • Choosing the cloud that’s right for you

    Computerworld | There are degrees of commitment to the cloud, and more than one cloud model to consider.

    Mar 31, 2015

  • New York Genome Center Launches First LDT, Whole Exome Sequencing

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The New York Genome Center (NYGC) announced today that it has received approval from the New York State Department of Health to offer clinical whole exome sequencing for individuals with constitutional disorders. This is the first laboratory-developed test, or LDT, from the Center to be cleared for clinical diagnostic use.

    Mar 30, 2015

  • Horizon Pays $1.1 Billion for Hyperion’s Rare Disease Drugs

    Xconomy | Big buyout for an orphan drug company. Hyperion's two therapies treat urea cycle disorder, and earned the company $113.6 million in 2014.

    Mar 30, 2015

  • GigaScience Paper Demonstrates Pathogen Detection on the MinION

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A team of researchers led by Andy Kilianski of Maryland’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center has published a paper demonstrating the use of the MinION nanopore sequencer to accurately identify strains of bacteria and viruses.

    Mar 27, 2015

  • New Crop of Biotechs from Y Combinator

    Tech Crunch | This week marked Demo Day for budding companies incubated in Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, which began putting out feelers for biotech startups last year and is now moving with more confidence into the biomedical field.

    Mar 26, 2015

  • Emerald Opens Cloud Lab Facility

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Emerald Therapeutics is opening its first Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL) production facility, ECL-1, in the biotech corridor of South San Francisco. The robotics life sciences laboratory was announced last year, though plans were already underway for a move to South San Francisco. Since then, the company built a new production facility from the ground up and installed over $3 million of scientific instrumentation.  

    Mar 25, 2015