• The Henrietta Compromise: NIH Announces HeLa Data Use Agreement

    Bio-IT World | The National Institutes of Health announced this morning that it has reached an “understanding” with the family of Henrietta Lacks to allow controlled access to whole genome sequence data from HeLa cells, the cells derived without consent from the tumor of Henrietta Lacks in 1951.

    Aug 7, 2013

  • Fast Science: Real Time Genomics Moves to Mendelian Diseases

    Bio-IT World | Real Time Genomics chose cows for their first proof of principle, but a lot has changed in the 18 months since I sat down in their Hamilton, New Zealand, offices and toured a dairy farmer’s cooperative down the road. Today RTG’s extremely fast genomics analytics platform is proving itself faster, cheaper and more efficient than the competition for tackling Mendelian genetics.

    Aug 6, 2013

  • 23andMe Launches TV Ads for DTC Genomics

    Bio-IT World News Brief | 23andMe has launched a television advertising campaign. Portraits of Health focuses on educating consumers about how understanding their DNA can help them make more informed and proactive health decisions, while building brand awareness for 23andMe.

    Aug 6, 2013

  • Combination Therapy Targets Breast Cancer that has Spread to Brain

    UCLA Newsroom | Using a mouse-model system, researchers at UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have combined cellular therapy and gene therapy to develop a possible treatment for breast cancer that has spread to the brain.

    Aug 6, 2013

  • Kickstarting Cancer

    Forbes | What would crowd funding for cancer look like? A Forbes contributor suggests a Kickstarter campaign focusing on individuals with cancers that aren't responding to treatment or aren't well-characterized.

    Aug 5, 2013

  • Ceiba Launches Free Helium Analytical Workbench

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ceiba has introduced a free version of its Helium Data Workbench that offers more than 50 analytical functions to bring public life science data directly into Microsoft Excel, TIBCO Spotfire and the Helium Windows 8 app.

    Aug 5, 2013

  • July News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | News briefs and products from around the industry including Illumina's acquisitions, new products for clinical sites and data virtualization, Comcast in health-IT, and more.

    Aug 2, 2013

  • Biopharma Cubist Makes Two Acquisitions for up to $1.6B

    Bio-IT World News Brief |Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a Lexington, Mass.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on the research, development, and commercialization of pharmaceutical products that address significant unmet medical needs in the acute care environment has signed two merger agreements, with Trius Therapeutics and Optimer Pharmaceuticals. The combined total of the two acquisitions could $1.6 billion.

    Aug 2, 2013

  • Foundation Medicine's IPO Prospects

    Boston Globe | Foundation Medicine filed plans this week to raise $86.25 million in an IPO, and the Boston Globe posits it could be aiming too low.

    Aug 1, 2013

  • An Expert's Overview: the Genomics of Genius, Alzheimer's, and the Future of Hospitals

    Medspace | Eric Topol weighs in on what he's seen interesting on the Web lately including the genomics of genius, Alzheimer's Disease, and the obsolete future of the hospital room

    Jul 31, 2013

  • NVIDIA Acquires The Portland Group

    Bio-IT World News Brief | NVIDIA has acquired The Portland Group (PGI), a supplier of tools and compilers for high performance computing. "PGI and its exceptionally talented staff will continue to operate under the PGI flag – developing OpenACC, CUDA Fortran and CUDA x86 for multicore x86 and, of course, GPGPUs," NVIDIA said on its blog.

    Jul 30, 2013

  • 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