• 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

  • deCODE Publishes Largest Human Genome Population Study

    Bio-IT World | With a package of four papers published today in Nature Genetics, deCODE genetics presents the largest set of  human genomes from one population, and findings including a set of complete human knockouts, a new timeline for the common Y-chromosome ancestor, and loss-of-function variants that confer Alzheimer’s disease risk.

    Mar 25, 2015

  • Systematic Overhaul Recommended for Human Brain Project

    Nature News | An independent committee reviewing the goals and practices of Europe's Human Brain Project (HBP) has substantially sided with critics of the effort, proposing major changes to the HBP's governance and to its central mission of creating a computer simulation of the human brain.

    Mar 24, 2015

  • New Online Tool Creates Guide RNAs for CRISPR Gene Editing

    Bio-IT World | Horizon Discovery, a Cambridge, UK-based research supply company with a focus on gene editing experiments, has launched a free online tool to design guide RNA for CRISPR experiments.

    Mar 20, 2015

  • CRISPR in the Germline

    Bio-IT World News Brief | There is a renewed urgency to public conversations about the ethics of genome editing, thanks to the emergence of CRISPR, a gene engineering technology so effective and easy to use that scientists are racing to keep up with its potential applications.

    Mar 20, 2015

  • The Right Drug the First Time

    Bio-IT World | Scientists in the growing field of pharmacogenetics believe that new DNA tests can protect patients from adverse drug responses and ineffective prescriptions. Yet it's been an uphill battle to convince payers, medical centers, and clinicians to embrace these tests in mainstream medicine.

    Mar 19, 2015

  • Ginkgo Bioworks Opens Its Genetic Engineering Foundry

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ginkgo Bioworks announced this morning that its synthetic biology “foundry,” an 18,000 square foot facility on the Boston waterfront designed to rapidly iterate through new prototypes of genetically modified organisms, is open for business.

    Mar 18, 2015

  • 23andMe Therapeutics Won't Change Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | 23andMe's new drug discovery unit isn't the next disruptive health innovation from Silicon Valley, but it is a good move for a company that should know better than anyone how to turn genetic data into real value.

    Mar 17, 2015

  • Tute Genomics Shares Genetic Variants Database on Google Genomics

    Bio-IT World | Google Genomics and Tute Genomics have announced that a Tute database of 8.5 billion annotations of genetic variants is publicly available through Google Genomics. The database will be hosted on Google Genomics, and can be queried at regular Google Genomics query rates.

    Mar 12, 2015

  • 23andMe Enters The Drug Business Just As Apple Changes It

    Forbes | 23andMe CEO and Founder Anne Wojcicki 23andMe, the Google-backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself. It's not just talk. The company has hired Richard Scheller, who led drug discovery at Genentech.

    Mar 12, 2015