• Google to Cover Foundation Medicine Tests for All Employees

    BetaBoston | Foundation Medicine, the largest and most visible provider of broad genetic tests for personalized cancer therapy, announced this week that Google will pay for its tests for anyone covered under Google health plans.

    Nov 6, 2014

  • AstraZeneca Buys Definiens in Bid for Ground-Up Co-Diagnostics Pipeline

    Bio-IT World News Brief | AstraZeneca announced that it has acquired Definiens, a diagnostics company specializing in image analysis software, as part of a strategy to refine its immuno-oncology programs.

    Nov 5, 2014

  • October News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product releases from around the industry, including the GIANT Consortium's record-breaking GWAS, a new organ-on-a-chip company, and plenty of announcements from the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics.

    Nov 4, 2014

  • NCI Awards Contracts for Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The National Cancer Institute has chosen two academic institutes and one private company to develop separate compute infrastructures for the analysis of cloud-hosted genomics data generated by large, public projects.

    Nov 3, 2014

  • Jonathan Rothberg Pursues Mobile Ultrasound

    MIT Technology Review | Jonathan Rothberg, founder of both 454 Life Sciences and Ion Torrent, is touting a new startup from his 4Combinator tech incubator that is developing a low-cost ultrasound device to plug into a smartphone.

    Nov 3, 2014

  • In a Restless Preclinical Testing Market, Organs-on-Chips Company MIMETAS Is in Expansion Mode

    Bio-IT World | Dutch startup MIMETAS, whose microfluidics technology forms a platform for three-dimensional, multi-cell-type tissue cultures, is securing new funding and partnerships as it expands its line of drug screening models.

    Oct 31, 2014

  • Expanding the Search for Knockout Mutations to the Human Population

    Nature News | With mass sequencing of humans now a practical reality, several large population studies are searching for people with rare mutations that completely knock out specific genes, to uncover these genes' functions and potentially new drug targets.

    Oct 29, 2014

  • Large Funding Round for Massachusetts Biotech Syros

    Xconomy | Syros Pharmaceuticals, a biotech focused on creating drugs that target gene expression regulatory pathways, has announced a $53 million Series B financing round.

    Oct 27, 2014

  • The Peculiar Internet Market for Genetic Health Reports

    MIT Technology Review | Since the FDA made clear last November that it would not tolerate companies selling genetic tests linked to health reports without regulatory approval, a workaround for customers of companies like 23andMe has emerged online.

    Oct 24, 2014

  • New Microscopy Technique Offers Astounding Resolution Over Time

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A paper published today in Science describes a new type of fluorescence microscope that is capable of taking images of living, three-dimensional systems over long periods of time without degrading cells or fluorescent molecules.

    Oct 23, 2014

  • Inside the HIVE, the FDA's Multi-Omics Compute Architecture

    Bio-IT World | At the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, a custom distributed computing system called HIVE takes a new approach to storing and analyzing huge sets of genomic and other biological data.

    Oct 22, 2014

  • New Data and Deployments from Edico Genome

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Edico Genome, a San Diego-based company manufacturing application-specific integrated circuits for processing genomic data, this week announced the broad commercial launch of its flagship DRAGEN processor.

    Oct 21, 2014

  • Instant Genome Browsing Over the Web with the NextCODE Exchange

    Bio-IT World | NextCODE Health has launched a new genomic data sharing environment, in which collaborators can browse and analyze one another's whole genome datasets at single-base resolution, as well as make individual variants publicly visible for research on rare genetic disease.

    Oct 20, 2014

  • BLAST in the Amazon Cloud

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has declared that its installation of BLAST in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace is "the easiest way to start an NCBI BLAST instance."

    Oct 17, 2014

  • PacBio Releases New Chemistry

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Pacific Biosciences, maker of the RSII sequencing instrument, has launched a new reagent kit to boost both the throughput and read length of its sequencers.

    Oct 16, 2014

  • 2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices Call for Entries Is Open

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is now seeking entries for the 2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition, an awards program that for eleven years has highlighted technology innovations to enable drug discovery, biomedical research, and the practice of medicine.

    Oct 15, 2014

  • The Next Generation of DNA Vaccines Is Poised to Transform the Healthcare Landscape

    Bio-IT World | Contributed Commentary | Teri Heiland argues that advances in vaccine delivery and vector design are paving the way to safe and effective nucleic acid vaccines, which could be used against pathogens, allergies, autoimmune disease and in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy.

    Oct 13, 2014

  • Cell Culture Model of Alzheimer's First to Recapitulate Key Physiology

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A new model of Alzheimer's disease, created at the Genetics and Aging Research Unit of Massachusetts General Hospital, is the first to recreate both the "plaques" and the "tangles" that the amyloid hypothesis predicts are central to the disease's symptoms.

    Oct 13, 2014

  • Copy Number Variants in Neurological Disease

    Pacific Standard | More reliable methods for detecting large copy number variants across the whole genome are helping to reveal the importance of these mutations in explaining neurological disorders.

    Oct 10, 2014

  • Roche Purchases AbVitro's DNA Enrichment Technology for Clinical Samples

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Roche, which has been retooling its next generation sequencing strategy since beginning the closure of 454 Life Sciences last October, has acquired a new sample preparation technology for an NGS pipeline.

    Oct 10, 2014