• President Obama Heralds New Precision Medicine Initiative in State of the Union

    Bio-IT World | Commentators from around the science and healthcare world react to President Obama's announcement, in last night's State of the Union address, that his new budget will propose a Precision Medicine Initiative to support research into individualized therapies based on patients' unique genetic and molecular profiles.

    Jan 21, 2015

  • SV Bio Relaunched as Lifecode, Maker of LDTs

    Bio-IT World | SV Bio today announced a new name, a new focus, and a new product: a next generation sequencing (NGS)-based oncology assay, the Pan Cancer Somatic Panel (PCSP).

    Jan 20, 2015

  • Biotech Boom or Biotech Bubble?

    New York Times | "I have my seatbelt and crash helmet on," a biotech CEO tells The New York Times in an investigation of soaring biotechnology stocks and drug approvals in the wake of last week's J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

    Jan 20, 2015

  • LifeMap Releases NGS Phenotyper

    Bio-IT World Product Brief | LifeMap Sciences has released VarElect, an application that David Warshawsky, CEO of the company, calls a next-generation sequencing phenotyper. The tool leverages LifeMap’s integrated biomedical knowledgebase and discovery platform for biomedical research, which includes GeneCards human gene database; MalaCards human disease database; and LifeMap Discovery, the database of embryonic development, stem cell research, and regenerative medicine.

    Jan 20, 2015

  • Atul Butte Moves to UCSF to Head Computational Health Sciences Institute

    Bio-IT World | UC San Francisco announced this morning that it has recruited Atul Butte to lead the new Institute for Computational Health Sciences, an Institute the University says will serve at the cornerstone of its efforts to harness the power of big data for precision medicine. He's also been named executive director of clinical informatics for UC Health Sciences and Services.

    Jan 15, 2015

  • Genome wiz Venter partners with Roche in DNA sequencing deal

    Reuters | Genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has signed a multi-year deal to sequence and analyze tens of thousands of genomes for Roche's Genentech unit in a deal aimed at identifying new drug targets.

    Jan 15, 2015

  • Whistleblower Lawsuit Calls Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiongs Healthcare Startup Fraudulent And Dangerous

    Forbes | On the television newsmagazine "60 Minutes" and in a cover story for Forbes, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the world's richest doctor, has promised that his new company, NantHealth, can dramatically improve care for cancer patients everywhere. "I'm incredibly encouraged to say that we are on the path," Soon-Shiong told 60 Minutes' Sanjay Gupta. [...]

    Jan 15, 2015

  • 10X Genomics Announces a High-Throughput Platform for Synthetic Long Reads

    Bio-IT World | 10X Genomics made its public debut this week at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, touting a platform that will complement Illumina's next-gen sequencers with a massively multiplexed system for reconstructing long-range genomic information.

    Jan 14, 2015

  • A New Dawn For Biotech

    Forbes | This week, much of the biotech investing world is in San Francisco for the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Old timers like me -- I've attended nearly every year since 1998 -- remember the infinitely more manageable Hambrecht & Quist conference, still quaintly known as H&Q.

    Jan 14, 2015

  • Merck Makes Investment in Moderna

    Forbes | Moderna Therapeutics has snagged another $100m of financing, this time from Merck. A $50m cash up front payment for messenger RNA technology along with a $50m equity payment is a strong vote of confidence from the pharma in mRNA's future.

    Jan 14, 2015

  • A Restless Illumina on Display in CEO's J.P. Morgan Address

    Bio-IT World | In his address at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Illumina CEO Jay Flatley announced new high-throughput instruments, a refined regulatory strategy centered on the NextSeq mid-range sequencer, and progress in oncology and prenatal testing, as his company pivots to a more hands-on approach to clinical genomics.

    Jan 13, 2015

  • GENALICE, Knome Announce Partnership

    Bio-IT World News Brief | GENALICE and Knome today announced a strategic partnership to offer their products together as a turn-key solution for those using next-generation sequencing (NGS) data to interpret patients’ genomes.

    Jan 12, 2015

  • Foundation Medicine Majority Stake Acquired by Roche for $1.03b

    Bio-IT World | Roche announced this morning that it has acquired a majority stake in Foundation Medicine. Roche will tender approximately $780m for 56.3% of the company.

    Jan 12, 2015

  • Biotechs may face a slowdown

    BostonGlobe.com | These are boom times in biotechnology. Forty-one new drugs were approved for US sale in 2014, the highest tally in 18 years. A record 63 biotech startups went public, breaking the 1999 record of 52 initial public offerings. And the value of biopharma merger deals nearly tripled to $223 billion from a year earlier.

    Jan 12, 2015

  • Biogen buys UK-based neuropathic pain drug developer for up to $675M

    Boston Business Journal | The Cambridge biotech firm, known best for its drugs for multiple sclerosis, announced the acquisition of Convergence Pharmaceuticals.

    Jan 12, 2015

  • 23andMe Turns Spit Into Dollars in Deal With Pfizer

    Bloomberg | 23andMe Inc., the genetic-testing startup backed by Google Inc., is sharing DNA data on about 650,000 individuals with Pfizer Inc., to help find new targets to treat disease and to design clinical trials.

    Jan 12, 2015

  • Chinese Services Group WuXi Buys NextCODE Health for $65m

    Bio-IT World | WuXi PharmaTech headquartered in Shanghai has acquired NextCODE Health of Iceland for $65 million in cash. The acquisition will merge the WuXi Genome Center with NextCODE to form WuXi NextCODE Genomics.

    Jan 9, 2015

  • The What and Why on 2014s Record High Drug Approvals

    Forbes | 2014 saw the highest number of new drug applications approved by FDA since 1996, but John LaMattina argues that the year was even more successful than that.

    Jan 8, 2015

  • New Antibiotic Discovered in Dirt

    New York Times | Researchers yesterday announced a new antibiotic found in dirt. Teixobactin has not been tested in humans, but was extremely effective in animal tests.

    Jan 8, 2015

  • Novartis Deal Signals Big Pharma's Entrance in CRISPR-Based Therapies

    Bio-IT World | Novartis today became the first big pharma company to announce a CRISPR program, through a deal with Intellia Therapeutics and Caribou Biosciences that will cover CAR-T therapies and hematopoietic stem cell programs.

    Jan 7, 2015