• 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

  • 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