• BGI Scientists Expand Reference Genes for Human Microbiome

    Bio-IT World | The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), China's gene sequencing powerhouse, has released a set of reference genes for the human gut microbiome, in a catalogue that is substantially larger and covers a greater diversity of human populations than any previous resources.

    Jul 14, 2014

  • Illumina Chosen as Service Provider for Genomics England Project

    Technology Review | Illumina has been chosen as the "preferred partner" for the UK's 100,000 genomes project. Genomics England chose Illumina to do the sequencing, and said that fewer than five other companies bid for the job.

    Jul 13, 2014

  • Peer Inside the American Gut

    Bio-IT World News Brief | This Wednesday, American Gut, the crowdsourced project that has now sequenced gut microbiota samples from over 3,000 volunteers, released both a round of results and its own analytical pipeline.

    Jul 11, 2014

  • Human Brain Project Responds to Complaints

    Bio-IT World | Today, the leadership of the Human Brain Project circulated a document responding to this Monday's open letter to the European Commission, in which neuroscientists aired concerns about the aims and decision-making processes behind the HBP.

    Jul 10, 2014

  • AWS Summit Kicks Off in New York, Features Best of Show Winner

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The Amazon Web Services Cloud Summit kicked off with a keynote from Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer. Vogels announced CloudWatch Logs to monitor the system and application logs for trends and events over time, and highlighted the work of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research using a 2014 Bio-IT World Best of Show winner.

    Jul 10, 2014

  • Scripps Calls off USC Merger or Acquisition Discussions

    U-T San Diego | The rumored merger of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and the University of Southern California is off, the Scripps board of trustees said yesterday

    Jul 10, 2014

  • Appistry Launches NGS Pipeline Creation Challenge

    Bio-IT World News Brief | If you’ve got an idea for a next-gen sequencing analysis pipeline—and you’re creative on camera—Appistry invites you to participate in its inaugural Appistry Pipeline Challenge. The winning group will receive $70,000 worth of hardware and software to build its pipeline.

    Jul 9, 2014

  • Francis Collins on Horizons in Biomedicine

    Wall Street Journal | In an oped in the Wall Street Journal, Francis Collins gives his view of the "broad horizon" before biomedical research today.

    Jul 9, 2014

  • AbbVie Raises Bid for Shire

    New York Times | AbbVie raised its bid for Shire this morning to a cash and stock offering worth about $87.66 per share, or $51.6 billion total.

    Jul 8, 2014

  • Human Brain Project Faces Growing Skepticism from Neuroscientists

    Bio-IT World | This morning, the European Commission received an open letter signed by 154 European neuroscientists, expressing concern over the direction of the Human Brain Project that was launched last year.

    Jul 7, 2014

  • China FDA Approves Two Chinese Sequencers, NIPT Kit

    South China Morning Post | The China Food & Drug Administration approved two sequencers from BGI--the BGISEQ-1000 and BGISEQ-100--and a diagnostic kit for prenatal testing of "high risk" pregnancies.

    Jul 3, 2014

  • Maximizing Success from Vendor Consolidation

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | The global pharmaceutical industry faces challenges that require it to look beyond the status quo and develop a fresh transformative vision for the future. Many pharmas are now looking to consolidate vendors as they embark on restructuring and cost reduction efforts.

    Jul 3, 2014

  • NIH Funds Six Centers in Undiagnosed Diseases Network

    NBC News | Yesterday the National Institutes of Health launched the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a four-year, $43 million program focused on the rarest of diseases, many afflicting fewer than 50 people worldwide.

    Jul 3, 2014

  • Big BRAIN: Finding Connections in the Literature Flood with Euretos BRAIN

    Bio-IT World | Euretos is certainly not the first company to recognize the problems researchers have processing and keeping up to date with the latest research. While there’s ever more data pouring from researchers’ lab instruments, there’s also an ongoing flow to manage from journals and other publications. Euretos has launched a cloud platform called BRAIN: the Bio Relations and Intelligence Network, that allows researchers to mine and connect data from public and private published sources in new ways.

    Jul 1, 2014

  • Robots for Hire: Emerald Launches Robotic Laboratories for Life Sciences

    Bio-IT World | Outsourcing options in biotech have been growing. CROs and other labs offer a wide range of services. But what if you aren’t interested in a partner as much as simply automated experiments? Don’t outsource experiments to another lab; let the robots do them!

    Jul 1, 2014

  • FDA Loves Genetic Tests, If Accurate

    Bio-IT World Brief | In a comment on FDA's blog on Thursday, Jeffrey Shuren, Director of FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, again restated the Agency's concern with 23andMe's direct-to-consumers genomic tests. The issue, 
    "at the heart of our five-year effort to work with the firm 23andMe," he says, is accuracy.

    Jun 30, 2014

  • The Hunt for a New Human Reference Genome

    Bio-IT World | The human reference genome has served geneticists well since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. But with new sequencing technologies and a unique cell line, a team attached to the Genome Reference Consortium is tinkering with a new "platinum genome" based on a single haploid sample, a reference that could better represent structural variants and the range of human haplotypes.

    Jun 30, 2014

  • Illumina Releases Long-Read Apps and Library Prep Kits

    Bio-IT World | Illumina is looking to expand its footprint in long-read sequencing applications, with big announcements this week about its TruSeq synthetic long-read technology.

    Jun 27, 2014

  • The UberCloud Experiment - Exploring Life Sciences in the Cloud

    Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | Cost savings, shorter time to market, better quality, less product failures: the benefits that engineers and scientists can expect from using technical computing in their research, design, and development processes can be huge. The UberCloud Experiment provides a platform for scientists and engineers to explore, learn and understand the end-to-end process of accessing and using Cloud resources, to identify concerns and resolve roadblocks.

    Jun 25, 2014

  • Sequencing the Strange Communities: Taking on Metagenomics

    Bio-IT World | In another look at the Hi-C process for sorting out disparate bits of DNA, Jonathan Eisen’s lab at UC Davis tweaks the Markov Cluster Algorithm to take on metagenomics. The results need further attention, but could be extremely useful for joining plasmids and chromosomes from the same species.

    Jun 24, 2014