• Single-Celled Protist Has Extraordinary Fragmented Genome

    Bioscience Technology | The pond-dwelling protist Oxytricha Trifallax, already known for the genomic oddity of having roughly 16,000 chromosomes, has revealed an even more remarkable quirk in its native DNA.

    Sep 9, 2014

  • Actionable Genome Consortium to Define Best Practices for Cancer Genetics

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Gene sequencing company Illumina has joined with four major cancer centers to found the Actionable Genome Consortium, an organization dedicated to publicizing standards for cancer genetics.

    Sep 8, 2014

  • Washington University Rolls Out Open Source Epigenomics Browser

    Bio-IT World | Coinciding with the completion of an early phase of the NIH-funded Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a team at Washington University in St. Louis has created a genome browser with added capabilities to deal with epigenetic data.

    Sep 8, 2014

  • Edico Genome Makes First Sale of NGS Processor

    Bio-IT World | Edico Genome, which claims its DRAGEN chip can assemble a whole human genome and call variants in as little as 20 minutes, has made its first sale of the device to prenatal testing company Sequenom, which will use the DRAGEN to search for genetic disorders in fetal DNA samples.

    Sep 4, 2014

  • modENCODE Project Reveals Evolutionary Patterns of Gene Activation(2)

    New York Times | As the modENCODE project catalogues the transcription factors and other regulatory elements at work in fruit fly and worm cells at various stages of development, scientists are learning that many of the genetic regulatory elements at work in humans have deep evolutionary roots.

    Sep 2, 2014

  • New NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy Straddles a Fine Line

    Bio-IT World News Brief | This week, the NIH issued its long awaited Genomic Data Sharing Policy, which encourages researchers to obtain the broadest possible patient consent for open data sharing, while at the same time considering new privacy measures to protect vulnerable patient populations.

    Aug 29, 2014

  • August News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product releases from around the industry, including a trial to support broad genotyping of tumors, and new annotation tools from Appistry.

    Aug 29, 2014

  • Berg and the Pursuit of the Body's Hidden Drugs

    Bio-IT World | Berg, a Cambridge-based pharma company, believes human cells may be harboring compounds that could be used to treat diabetes, cancer, and neurological diseases. To find them, they're handing tissue samples over to their in-house data mining platform, Interrogative Biology.

    Aug 28, 2014

  • DNA Barcoding to Combat Mass Food Fraud

    Chemical & Engineering News | Armed with new technologies to identify food products on a molecular level, regulators are combating the multi-billion dollar international practice of food fraud.

    Aug 26, 2014

  • Updates from the Genome in a Bottle Consortium

    Bio-IT World | At the Next Generation Dx Summit in Washington, DC, Justin Zook of the National Institute of Standards and Technology discussed the pace of progress at the Genome in a Bottle Consortium, including new reference materials and the project's role in FDA evaluation of next-generation sequencing technologies.

    Aug 25, 2014

  • Illumina to Support 'Companion Therapeutics' in Oncology

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Illumina today announced collaborations with AstraZeneca, Sanofi, and Janssen Biotech, to participate in patient stratification for the development of new cancer drugs by offering a multi-gene panel that covers key cancer mutations.

    Aug 21, 2014

  • Seven Bridges Introduces Open Source Cancer Genomics Workflow

    Bio-IT World | After presenting an open source pipeline for analyzing cancer genomes at Cold Spring Harbor this May, Seven Bridges is seeking hospital and lab partners to test the system in a clinical setting.

    Aug 20, 2014

  • GeneDx Seeks Invalidation of Myriad's BRCA Patents

    Bio-IT World News Brief | GeneDx, a commercial genetic diagnostics lab located in Gaithersburg, Maryland, this week filed eleven petitions to invalidate patent claims held by Myriad Genetics, adding another new thread to the increasingly complicated web of litigation surrounding Myriad.

    Aug 20, 2014

  • A Sensitive Tool for Detecting Indels

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has released an open source algorithm, called Scalpel, for finding insertions and deletions in next generation sequencing data sets, and published a paper in Nature Methods using this tool to identify mutations in children affected by autism.

    Aug 18, 2014

  • Could Pharma Companies Succeed in the Digital Health Market?

    Forbes | Jason Bloomberg speaks to pharma executives and industry observers who believe top drug companies could soon focus more of their efforts on creating electronic health platforms, collecting user data and to more precisely define disease risks and personalize prevention and treatment.

    Aug 18, 2014

  • New Alignment Method to Speed Up De Novo Assembly of Whole Genomes

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A paper posted this week to the preprint server bioRxiv describes MHAP, a new tool that can reportedly assemble whole genomes de novo from long-read sequencing data hundreds of times faster than previous workflows.

    Aug 15, 2014

  • FDA Plans to Introduce Web Portal for Tracking Device Submissions

    Regulatory Focus | The FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) is piloting a program that would let companies track the progress of medical devices and diagnostic tests submitted for premarket approval through the agency's review process.

    Aug 15, 2014

  • Transcriptic Aims to Make the Biology Lab Programmable

    Bio-IT World | The Menlo Park startup Transcriptic is now hiring out its robotics lab to automate life science tasks — but its real innovation is a programming interface that lets users customize their lab procedures down to the smallest pipetting step.

    Aug 13, 2014

  • Modular Brain Model Joins Neurons in Three Dimensions

    New York Times | Scientists at Tufts University have produced a three-dimensional model of the brain in which rat neurons can be grown for months at a time in the lab.

    Aug 12, 2014

  • Pistoia Alliance Forms Expert Group on Controlled Substance Legislation

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The Pistoia Alliance, an industry group that addresses non-competitive problems shared by stakeholders in drug development, today announced the launch of an expert community to streamline how pharma companies and their partners track the laws governing the use and distribution of chemical substances worldwide.

    Aug 11, 2014