• Advances in Genetic Engineering at the 2014 American Society for Microbiology Meeting

    Bio-IT World | Presenters at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology showed off new applications for the CRISPR system of gene editing, and projects that have re-coded bacterial genomes on a massive scale.

    May 22, 2014

  • GenePeeks Launches Sperm Donor Matching Service

    Bio-IT World News Brief | GenePeeks has opened its in silico nursery, formally launching the Matchright screening service for families who are planning to use a sperm donor to conceive.

    May 22, 2014

  • N-of-One Signs Agreement with Mayo Clinic

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Mayo Clinic and N-of-One, have signed an agreement under which N-of-One will provide Mayo Clinic with clinical interpretation information to aid in highly complex molecular diagnostics.

    May 21, 2014

  • QIAGEN Adds HGMD and Other BIOBASE Offerings, Plans Ingenuity Clinical

    Bio-IT World News Brief | QIAGEN is adding content from BIOBASE including HGMD, the human gene mutation database, to its bioinformatics offerings. HGMD and other BIOBASE solutions will provide the foundation for Ingenuity Clinical, QIAGEN's forthcoming clinical NGS decision-support solution.

    May 21, 2014

  • A European Look at the Changing Landscape of Prenatal Testing

    Bio-IT World | At the Prenatal Molecular Diagnostics Europe conference last week in Lisbon conversations ranged from the current landscape in prenatal diagnostics to the future vision of the technology and the regulatory environment that will enable it.

    May 21, 2014

  • At AstraZeneca, Occasion for Introspection

    Bio-IT World | On Friday, a frank assessment of AstraZeneca's R&D practices appeared in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, just as Pfizer's repeated takeover bids have increased scrutiny of AstraZeneca's drug development pipeline.

    May 19, 2014

  • LifeMap Solutions Joins New Wave of Genetic Health Companies

    Bio-IT World | With a close partnership with Eric Schadt’s Icahn Institute for Genomics at Mt. Sinai, LifeMap Solutions is an intriguing – though closely-guarded – entrant into the renewed rush to provide genetic health information to patients.

    May 19, 2014

  • Illumina CTO Joins Board of BaseHealth

    Bio-IT World News Brief | BaseHealth, whose platform Genophen uses patients' unique genetic and clinical profiles to assess their personal health risks, today announced a tightening of its relationship with Illumina.

    May 15, 2014

  • Broad and Novartis Keep Up with Big Data

    Bio-IT World | At this April's Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, representatives from the Broad Institute and Novartis presented new tools for bioassays and drug development.

    May 15, 2014

  • NIH Addresses Gender Bias in Preclinical Studies

    Nature | The NIH yesterday announced new policies to correct a tendency to study male cells and animals in preclinical research, including a requirement that applicants for NIH grants disclose the balance of male and female models used in their studies.

    May 15, 2014

  • Ayasdi Seeks Out the Underlying Shapes of Big Data

    Bio-IT World | Ayasdi, an informatics company whose topological analysis platform searches for unpredictable patterns in large datasets, is expanding its footprint in the life sciences with new products and partnerships.

    May 14, 2014

  • Expiration of NIH Program Leads to Broad Institute Layoffs

    Boston Globe | The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has announced layoffs of 27 employees involved in contract work for the NIH-funded Molecular Library Probe Center Network.

    May 13, 2014

  • Helen Berman Honored with Benjamin Franklin Award

    Bio-IT World | Helen Berman, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at the Center for Integrative Proteomics Research at Rutgers University, was honored with the Benjamin Franklin Award at the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo for her work building the Protein Data Bank.

    May 12, 2014

  • Pfizer Pressing Charm Offensive Over Potential AstraZeneca Buy

    Bio-IT World News Brief | After weeks of rejected offers to acquire AstraZeneca, and public skepticism over the outcome of such a deal, Pfizer this morning released a series of videos promoting the potential merger as a boon to science.

    May 12, 2014

  • IBM Launches Elastic Storage

    Computerworld | Today, IBM released a commercial version of the "Elastic Storage" memory architecture it has used internally for its Watson supercomputing program.

    May 12, 2014

  • Final Keynotes at Bio-IT World Wrestle with Genetic Privacy

    Bio-IT World | Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, "genome hacker" Yaniv Erlich, and public data advocate Isaac Kohane joined each other onstage on the last day of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo to discuss the perils and the promise of publicly available genetic data.

    May 9, 2014

  • DNA Electronics Scaling Up Operations

    Bio-IT World News Brief | This morning, DNA Electronics announced a significant expansion of its internal R&D, doubling its product development staff from 30 to 60 scientists. The company also brought on Steve Allen to serve as COO.

    May 8, 2014

  • Organism with Artificial DNA Bases Marks Milestone in Synthetic Biology

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A paper by a team of researchers from the Scripps Institute, published yesterday in Nature, describes the first stable, self-replicating organism whose DNA contains bases other than the well-known A, G, C and T.

    May 8, 2014

  • Topple the Walls, Open the Data

    Bio-IT World | Stephen Friend, the president of Sage Bionetworks, gave the keynote presentation at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Wednesday morning on enhancing communication within the biomedical research community. Friend’s communication concerns span every level of research, from creating protein pathway models, to analyzing patient data. 

    May 7, 2014

  • Genetic Pioneers GET a Taste of the Science's Imaginative Future

    Bio-IT World | The fifth annual Genomes Environments Traits (GET) Conference convened in Cambridge last week, uniting dozens of individuals who have undergone whole genome sequencing to discuss where their data is leading researchers.

    May 5, 2014