• 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

  • Best of Show Winners Named at 2014 Bio-IT World Conference

    Bio-IT World | The Best of Show awards presented at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo this week recognized significant advances in life sciences IT. New products from Ayasdi, GenoSpace, and Cycle Computing took home the top prizes at this year's competition.

    May 2, 2014

  • 2014 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award Winners Named

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World announced the winners of its tenth annual Best Practices Awards competition yesterday morning in a plenary session at the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.

    Apr 30, 2014

  • Bio-IT World 2014: Notes from the Expo Floor

    Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo started yesterday evening with a fantastic opening keynote address from John Quackenbush, CEO of GenoSpace and professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a welcoming reception on a packed Expo Hall floor. Over 2,800 life sciences, pharmaceutical, clinical, healthcare, and IT professionals will join us this week for three days of programming across 13 tracks. Here’s a brief summary of some of the news and announcements made thus far. 

    Apr 30, 2014

  • April News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News and product releases from around the industry, including new prognostics for cancer care, and a bioinformatics suite for NGS data in cancer research.

    Apr 25, 2014

  • Persephone, the Real-Time Genome Browser

    Bio-IT World | Though Ceres never expected to become a software provider, the plant engineering company has found itself with a platform for viewing and exploring genetic data that it believes will vastly outperform the industry standard.

    Apr 25, 2014

  • Working Group Recommendations for Investigating Causality for Sequence Variants

    Bio-IT World | An excellent Nature Perspectives piece, published today, takes on the issues surrounding causality. The paper represents the conclusions of a working group of experts in genomic research, analysis and clinical diagnostic sequencing convened by the US National Human Genome Research Institute.

    Apr 23, 2014

  • BaseHealth Seeks New Model for Offering Patients Genetic Health Information

    Bio-IT World | This morning, Los Altos-based startup BaseHealth emerged from stealth mode to announce the launch of Genophen, a preventive medicine platform that unites clinical and genetic data to help patients track and manage their risk of developing common chronic diseases.

    Apr 22, 2014

  • Pfizer Rebuffed by AstraZeneca, Regroups

    Bloomberg | Talks between Pfizer and AstraZeneca fizzled, but the possibility foretells future big deals, analysts say.

    Apr 22, 2014

  • More Big Pharma Shakeup: Novartis, GSK Trade Assets

    REuters | Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline announced this morning that they two big pharma are trading over $20 billion worth of assets in an attempt to strengthen their best businesses

    Apr 22, 2014

  • To Speed Sequencing, Edico Genome Proposes NGS Processor

    Bio-IT World | Of sequencing bottlenecks, the most lamented is the analysis pipeline. Edico Genome is developing the DRAGEN Bio-IT Processor, the world’s first Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) bioinformatics ASIC to speed and smooth that process.

    Apr 21, 2014

  • Remarkable Twin Study Widens View of Down's Syndrome

    Bio-IT World News Brief | A large coalition of European and American researchers this week published a new gene expression study of trisomy 21, better known as Down's syndrome, using a novel cellular model of the disorder.

    Apr 18, 2014