• Pfizer Transitions to D360 Drug Discovery Platform

    Bio-IT World | In 2010, Pfizer formed a partnership with Certara, an informatics company based in St. Louis, MO, to adopt Certara’s software system D360 as Pfizer’s core research platform. After a steady, months-long migration of users, Pfizer will complete its transition to D360 this year, replacing an internally-developed platform, RGate, in use since 2005. When the rollout is complete, D360 will be deployed to nearly 2,000 researchers across twelve global sites, making Pfizer the largest client to adopt D360 to date.

    Jul 29, 2013

  • New National Supercomputing Center Director

    News-Gazette | National Center for Supercomputing Applications will have a new director in January. Edward Seidel, a former post doc of Larry Smarr's.

    Jul 29, 2013

  • Biogen Idec's Open Space for Innovation

    Boston Globe | Biogen Idec is counting on the layout of its new Cambridge, Mass. building to foster conversations and collaboration. The new building opened last week and will have no offices and no cubicles, instead open work spaces, treadmill work stations, and "huddle rooms".

    Jul 29, 2013

  • Merck Finds Commercial Solution in Collaboration

    Bio-IT World | With a growing interest in biologics and a significant investment in deploying an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) to thousands of employees, Merck decided in 2011 to partner with PerkinElmer to expand the functionality of the informatics provider’s E-Notebook ELN solution to meet the needs of its biologics workflows.

    Jul 25, 2013

  • Malaria Open Source Research Progress

    Guardian | In 2010, GlaxoSmithKline, the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation and St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., publicly released over 20,000 compounds active against malaria, launching open source research into the disease.

    Jul 25, 2013

  • More Trouble for GSK in China

    New York Times | The New York Times has unearthed more trouble for GlaxoSmithKline in China. In addition to bribery allegations in terms of drug sales, the newly revealed documents suggest corruption in research as well as GSK's Shanghai R&D center.

    Jul 25, 2013

  • The Price of Free Data

    Bio-IT World | The Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision last month in favor of the Association for Molecular Pathology in its case against Myriad Genetics marked a tide change in the genetic testing industry and the Open Science movement.

    Jul 23, 2013

  • Genentech Finds Big Savings in Small Places

    Bio-IT World | At Genentech’s Mouse Genetics Department in South San Francisco, Dr. Rhonda Wiler and her team are proving that the simplest investments in IT can yield the biggest returns. An animal cage change program saved Genentech a staggering $411,000 a year, for an initial investment of just $40,000 in software development.

    Jul 18, 2013

  • China vs GSK

    In the Pipeline | Derek Lowe keeps tabs on the China-GSK story. Four GSK officials have been arrested, a fifth has been ordered to stay in the country. The official charges are bribery.

    Jul 18, 2013

  • Zinc Fingers Silence Trisomy Chromosome

    San Francisco Business Times | Sangamo BioSciences has used zinc finger technology to silence the extra chromosome in induced pluripotent stem cells exhibiting Down's Syndrome.

    Jul 17, 2013

  • Amyloid Plaque Location Predictive of Alzheimer's Disease

    Medical Xpress | The predictive value of amyloid plaque has been the subject of some debate in Alzheimer’s disease research. Now researchers have found that the location of amyloid plaque accumulations may play a role.

    Jul 17, 2013

  • Genomes Released of NCI-60 Cancer Cell Lines

    Bio-IT World | On Monday, researchers released the largest database of cancer-related genetic variations—the genomes of the 60 cancer cell lines represented by the NCI-60 list. The project was published online in Cancer Research (2013;73:4372-4382. Published OnlineFirst July 15, 2013).

    Jul 17, 2013

  • Oracle Updates In-Memory Database Product

    Computerworld | Oracle has announced a new version of its Exalytics appliance for high-speed data analysis. The SAP HANA competitor has 2TB of RAM, 2.4TB of flash storage and 5.4TB of traditional disk storage.

    Jul 16, 2013

  • State of Sequecing

    Chemical & Engineering News | Sequencing--where we've been and where we are going. Next generation sequencing has made progress, but the road ahead is still littered with challenges: payments, disclosure, and how sequencing fits in diagnostics.

    Jul 15, 2013

  • Arpeggi Adds Genome in a Bottle Consortium Data to GCAT

    Bio-IT World | Texas-based bioinformatics startup Arpeggi has announced the addition of data from the Genome in a Bottle Consortium to its online Genome Comparison & Analytical Testing (GCAT) toolkit. GCAT is a freely available cloud-based platform for evaluating the accuracy of next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis pipelines that provides performance reports which users can share and discuss with the community.

    Jul 15, 2013

  • George Church Podcast on the State of Genomics

    O'Reilly Radar | George Church weighs in on genomics, gene patents, medicine, and the spaceship in our backyard.

    Jul 15, 2013

  • The Cloud’s the Limit: Rentable Supercomputers for Improving Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | Creating a computer program that accurately tells pharmaceutical companies which candidate drugs they should spend millions of dollars developing may seem like a daunting task, but Schrodinger, a software company that specializes in life science applications, hopes to do just that.

    Jul 11, 2013

  • Celgene's Highly Effective Habits of Start-Up Partnerships

    Xconomy | Several of the recent and upcoming biotech IPOs have one thing in common: a partnership with Celgene. In their work with start ups a few Celgene habits stand out: a hands off approach, high-risk/high-reward picks, and flexibility in the deal.

    Jul 11, 2013

  • Building the Big Brain

    Bio-IT World | A decade-long project has produced a digital brain with 125,000 times the resolution of previous models. The work was published last month in Science and could offer new ways for brain research is conducted, tracked, and shared.

    Jul 10, 2013

  • Open Source Data Creates Jobs, Obama Says

    Computerworld | The Obama administration says that its Data.gov open source initiative, started in 2009, is creating  jobs and spawning start-ups, including many health-IT companies.

    Jul 9, 2013