• The Gene Test Question

    New York Times | Angelina Jolie announced drastic action this week--a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she carries a faulty copy of BRCA1. But this type of action isn't available to all women, thanks to the high costs of gene tests.

    May 21, 2013

  • Speed in the Consumer Cloud

    ReadWrite Cloud | ReadWrite tests the speed of the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services: Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

    May 20, 2013

  • Big R&D Spenders: Pharma and Chips

    In the Pipeline | Derek Lowe breaks down how much various companies and sectors spend on R&D. The big spenders? Drug discovery and semiconductor companies.

    May 20, 2013

  • The Elusive Exascale

    HPC Wire | Horst Simon believes we won’t be achieving exascale computing any time soon.

    May 17, 2013

  • BMS Set to Win on Cancer Combinations

    Forbes | Bristol-Myers Squibb's approved drug, Yervoy, is being tested in combination with several experimental drugs to treat advanced melanoma.

    May 16, 2013

  • Personalized Medicine's Season

    Wall Street Journal | The diagnostics market is its most attractive since 2007, and health care is the best performing sector of the public market right now.

    May 16, 2013

  • The Cost of Sequencing

    Opinionmics | If you want to talk about the cost of sequencing--how it's going down and by how much, Mick Watson has plotted it all out.

    May 15, 2013

  • Cliff Reid on Complete After BGI

    MendelsPod | Complete Genomics CEO, Cliff Reid, talks about the future after BGI’s buyout.

    May 15, 2013

  • Small Data Finding Could Help Big Data Quality

    Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | I get to have the most fun when someone wants to collaborate on a crazy idea. But crazy ideas come with unexpected challenges, too. Our paper on how dispensing methods affect datasets was published in PLOS ONE a week ago, and we would not have predicted the polarizing effect it has had.

    May 15, 2013

  • Big Data for Personalized Health

    Boston.com | GNS Healthcare's Colin Hill has been around for a while. But now is time for big data in personalized medicine, he says.

    May 13, 2013

  • Researchers Find 10% of Heart Disease Due to Spontaneous Mutations

    Yale News | Yale researchers scanned the genomes of 1800 individuals and found that 10% of congenital heart disease is due to de novo mutations, not found in affected newborn's parents.

    May 13, 2013

  • The Last First Base

    Bio-IT World | First Base | I received an email alert over the weekend with the following title: "Kevin Davies Reflects on Emotional Goodbye." The story was about a professional soccer player in the UK leaving the club he had captained and served for ten years. Coincidentally, I'm also doing a spot of reflection, for this is my last First Base editor's column for Bio-IT World.

    May 13, 2013

  • The Man Behind the Privacy Wake Up Call

    Nature News | When Yaniv Erlich published his work in Science identifying members of the 1000 Genomes Project, even he was surprised at how easy it was. “When he first saw the results, Erlich said later, he was so shocked at how easily the method worked that he had to go outside and take a walk,” Nature News reports.

    May 10, 2013

  • Salk Researchers Find Stem Cell Epigenetic Markers

    e Science News | Salk Institute of Biological Sciences finds epigenetic markers influence stem cells in human development. By studying various epigenetic influences, researchers examined the beginning states of cells before they differentiated.

    May 10, 2013

  • Sequestration and the US Brain Drain

    Huffington Post | What does the sequestration mean for science? One researcher says it will mean an exodus from science for young scientists as National Institute of Health grants are denied and top talent can’t find work—the ultimate brain drain.

    May 10, 2013

  • PRO-ACT: Bigger and Better ALS Database Open for Mining

    Bio-IT World | Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research is getting a major boost from a newly launched Pooled Resource Open-access ALS Clinical Trials (PRO-ACT) platform, which has amassed more than 8,500 de-identified clinical patient records into a single, harmonized dataset. Multiple pharmaceutical companies are now actively exploring PRO-ACT, seeking ways to streamline clinical trials and develop better treatments for the rare and highly heterogeneous disease more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

    May 10, 2013

  • Pharma Trends: Less Pills, More Money

    Forbes | IMS Health today released a report through its Institute for Healthcare Informatics saying that overall spending on U.S. medicines dropped fell 3.5% in 2012.

    May 9, 2013

  • UPDATED: EMC Storage, Cloud, and Life Sciences Announcements

    Bio-IT World Roundup | EMC rolled out several announcements this week during their EMC World event including updates on their life sciences suite, network-attached storage, and hybrid clouds.

    May 8, 2013

  • Incidental Findings in the Genomic Age

    Huffington Post | The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics recommended that all labs doing genomic sequencing look at 57 genes for mutations that could cause one of 24 life-threatening, but treatable conditions. This is medicine in the genomic age.

    May 6, 2013

  • Win-Win Solution for Cancer Drugs

    Harvard Business Review | Cancer drugs are expensive to make and expensive for patients. Last week 100 cancer specialists published an op ed in Blood claiming that the high cost of drugs is preventing some patients from being treated. But there is a win-win solution.

    May 6, 2013