• Broad, Intel Announce Speed Improvements to GATK Powered by Intel Optimizations

    Bio-IT World | The Broad Institute has announced that a new version of the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK), version 3.1, has been released and has been optimized for Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX). The improvements account for faster variant calling, achieving three to five times overall improvement in variant discovery.

    Mar 20, 2014

  • Watson Goes to NYGC for On-the-Job Training in Oncology

    Xconomy | The New York Genome Center has announced a collaboration with IBM and a large collection of New York health centers to apply Watson's machine learning capabilities to cancer therapy.

    Mar 19, 2014

  • Cas9 Technology Boom Inspires New Academic Center

    UC Berkeley | The academic home of Jennifer Doudna, whose discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system in 2012 triggered a new wave of interest in genetic engineering and gene therapy, is now dedicating substantial resources to fostering further Cas9 innovation.

    Mar 19, 2014

  • Google on Genomics

    SFGate | More on Google's plans within the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Google invited geneticists to upload genomic information to its cloud infrastructure for free.

    Mar 18, 2014

  • Selling Quantum Computing

    Computerworld | D-Wave is selling quantum computing systems that NASA, Google, and Lockheed Martin are testing. Y

    Mar 18, 2014

  • The Billionaires Backing Science

    New York Times | American science rests more on more on the shoulders of billionaire investor/philanthropists.

    Mar 17, 2014

  • GeneKey Aims to Go Beyond the Foundations

    Clinical Informatics News | As biomarker-based gene panels gain acceptance as standard tools in the oncologist’s toolbox, GeneKey is going deeper, into the whole exome and transcriptome of its patients’ cancers.

    Mar 14, 2014

  • Stanford Launches Center for Research About Research

    The Economist | A new institute at Stanford is taking on the role of research watchdog.

    Mar 14, 2014

  • Galapagos Sells Service Division to Charles River Laboratories

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Galapagos NV signed a definitive agreement to sell the BioFocus and Argenta service division operations to Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (NYSE: CRL) for almost $180 million (Euro 129 million) in upfront payments and another $7 million upon achievement of revenue targets.

    Mar 13, 2014

  • N-of-One Launches BaseSpace Variant Interpreter App

    Bio-IT World | N-of-One has launched Variant Interpreter, an app available on Illumina’s BaseSpace Apps, Illumina’s dedicated applications store and informatics community dedicated to advancing genomic analysis. 

    Mar 13, 2014

  • QIAGEN SVP on Big Vision and GeneReader

    Mendelspod | Dietrich Hauffe, SVP, life sciences at QIAGEN, spoke with Mendelspod about QIAGEN's big vision, the clinical portion of their business, and more about GeneReader.

    Mar 12, 2014

  • What Should We Make of BaseSpace?

    Bio-IT World | BaseSpace, Illumina's informatics app store, is an experimental model for the analysis of genetic data. Bio-IT World asks Illumina's Jordan Stockton how the multi-developer platform will fit the needs of high-volume labs that need coherent, flexible workflows.

    Mar 11, 2014

  • Acid-Induced Stem Cell Paper Questioned by Author

    New York Times | One of the Japanese team who published results in Nature in January claiming to have induced stem cells via an acid bath is calling for the paper's retraction.

    Mar 11, 2014

  • Protein Data Bank Guardian Named 2014 Franklin Award Winner

    Bio-IT World | Jeff Bizzaro, Chairman of Bioinformatics.org, today announced that Helen M. Berman, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is the 2014 Benjamin Franklin Award winner. 

    Mar 10, 2014

  • 23andMe CEO Stresses Medical Insights in Face of Slowing Enrollment

    The Guardian | At the SXSW Festival in Austin yesterday, Anne Wojcicki acknowledged that the recent FDA action prohibiting her company from reporting health information to customers “has slowed up the number of people signing up” for the personal genotyping service.

    Mar 10, 2014

  • Fetal Circulating DNA Tests Appropriate for All Pregnancies

    Forbes | A quick overview of using fetal circulating cells to test for trisomy 21 and trisomy 18, which accurately predicted trisomies in young, healthy pregnancies.

    Mar 10, 2014

  • Medicine in the Age of Supercomputers

    Bloomberg | Eric Schadt discusses how supercomputing will change medicine: first in handling ever-increasing data sizes and second in building predictive models of disease.

    Mar 7, 2014

  • Craig Venter Speaks with Eric Topol on the Future of Genomic Medicine

    Bio-IT World Roundup | Just days after the announcement of his new company, Human Longevity, Craig Venter sat down with Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute to discuss the future of genomic medicine.

    Mar 7, 2014

  • Goals for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

    Nature News | The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health was established to link genotypes with phenotypes to discover mechanisms of disease. The group just had their first official meeting.

    Mar 6, 2014

  • Broad Releases Updates to GenePattern

    Bio-IT World News Brief | The Broad Institute has released an updated version of GenePattern, the Institute’s open-source genome sequence analysis software with user-requested fixes and updates including a new user interface.

    Mar 5, 2014