• 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

  • Ewan Birney, Rolf Apweiler appointed Joint Directors of EMBL-EBI

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ewan Birney and Rolf Apweiler have been appointed Joint Directors of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). They will assume their new roles with effect from 1 July 2015. Professor Dame Janet Thornton steps down after 14 years as the EMBL-EBI director.  

    Mar 11, 2015

  • Merck Serono Signs Up with Illumina's Universal Oncology Test

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Illumina has brought another major pharmaceutical partner on board for its Universal Oncology Test program, an effort to build a next-generation sequencing-based gene panel covering all major cancer-related mutations that could be used to select personalized therapies.

    Mar 10, 2015

  • Unstructured Data and the Discovery Problem

    Bio-IT World | Tomorrow the Content Analyst Company will announce the general availability of Cerebrant, a SaaS-based discovery platform designed to enable subject matter experts in any industry to gain rapid insight into unstructured content.

    Mar 9, 2015

  • A Visit to the Digital Brain Library

    Ars Technica | The Digital Brain Library — whose physical collection of donated brains is currently housed at a laboratory in UC San Diego — aims to provide online access to virtual images of at least 1,000 unique human brains photographed at single-micron resolution.

    Mar 9, 2015

  • On the Case at Mount Sinai It’s Dr. Data

    New York Times | Jeffrey Hammerbacher, who started Facebook's data science team, now uses his skills to improve medical treatments, a switch inspired by his own health crisis.

    Mar 9, 2015

  • Zarxio Becomes First FDA-Approved Biosimilar

    Bloomberg | The FDA announced today that Novartis' white blood cell-stimulating drug Zarxio, a biosimilar version of Amgen's Neupogen, has received approval for use in all indications already covered by Neupogen.

    Mar 6, 2015

  • 'Junk DNA' Debates Still Piling Up

    New York Times | Carl Zimmer visits a pair of genetics labs as he digs into the ongoing arguments over whether our genome's vast tracts of noncoding DNA are mostly "junk."

    Mar 5, 2015

  • Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation Makes Its Largest Ever Equity Investment In A Biotech Company

    Forbes | The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing $52 million in CureVac, a German company involved in making vaccines. It is the largest ever investment by the foundation in a company, reflecting a new strategy of not just giving grants but supporting and having a stake in businesses.

    Mar 5, 2015

  • PacBio at AGBT

    Bio-IT World | Pacific Biosciences, the gold sponsor of this year's Advances in Genome Biology & Technology conference in Florida, hosted a workshop at the event that showed off the growing pipeline of tools for de novo diploid assembly, and ways in which routine use of this information could improve the practice of genomics.

    Mar 3, 2015

  • February News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product releases from around the industry, including guidance from the Association for Molecular Pathology on direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and the winner of the Swimming with the Sharks Competition at the Molecular Medicine Tri Conference.

    Mar 3, 2015

  • Reporter’s Notebook: Molecular Medicine Tri Conference 2015

    Bio-IT World | The 22nd annual Molecular Medicine Tri Conference in San Francisco is one of the year’s largest industry events for understanding human health on the level of genes, proteins, and cells, and this year’s conference tracked the latest trends in personalizing therapies and research programs with sharp attention to individuals’ unique molecular profiles.

    Feb 27, 2015

  • GCAT Team Publishes Methods, Results from Benchmark Tests of Aligners and Variant Callers

    Bio-IT World | GCAT, the Genome Comparison & Analytic Testing platform for benchmarking the performance of basic informatics tools, now has a formal home in the scientific literature with the publication of a paper in Nature Communications.

    Feb 26, 2015