• 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

  • The Model Approach to Drug Development

    Bio-IT World | In a presentation at the Bio-IT World Expo last month, Anna Kondic of Merck & Co. highlighted some recent successes and shortfalls of computer models in the development of cancer drugs.

    May 6, 2013

  • Benchmarking Amazon's Cloud

    Computerworld | When it comes to benchmarking cloud performance, it's not a straightforward task. Everything from operating system to time of day can impact the results. Computerworld takes on Amazon's EC2 and compares types of instances and times of day across several benchmarks, several times. They report back which instances worked, which crashed, and where the variability might come from.

    May 3, 2013

  • Intel's New CEO, the Interconnect, and Cray

    HPC Wire | Intel announced a new CEO yesterday, signaling changes at the company.  Intel might now be more inclined to boost efforts with its QLogic and Cray products more aggressively.

    May 3, 2013

  • Foundation Medicine Partners with Memorial Sloan-Kettering on Genomic Diagnostic for Blood Cancers

    Bio-IT World | Foundation Medicine and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center today announced a partnership to release a molecular diagnostic product designed to match patients with hematologic cancers (leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma) with the most rational targeted therapies or clinical trials for their cancer. This new product will complement FoundationOne, Foundation Medicine’s first product launched last year, which offers a similar genomic profile for solid tumors.

    May 2, 2013

  • Mount Sinai Chooses Sapio LIMS

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Just a few months after the New York Genome Center chose Sapio's Exemplar LIMS as its primary lab management and electronic lab notebook (ELN), the Genomics Core Facility at The Mount Sinai Medical Center has followed suit.

    May 2, 2013

  • Kevin Davies on the HGP 10th Anniversary and the March to the $1,000 Genome

    Bio-IT World | On DNA Day, April 25, a parade of leading genome scientists gathered at NIH to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP). Rounding out an outstanding list of speakers, including NIH Director Francis Collins, ENCODE project leader Ewan Birney, Princeton geneticist David Botstein and experts in evolutionary and population genetics, healthcare and cancer, was Bio-IT World editor Kevin Davies.

    May 1, 2013

  • Amazon Offers Cloud Certification

    ComputerWorld | Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a Global Certification Program to certify the technical skills associated with "building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using AWS technology," Amazon said.

    May 1, 2013

  • Back to Asia: A Sneak Peak of Bio-IT World Asia

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is hosting its second annual Bio-IT World Asia event in Singapore at the end of May—expanded to five tracks. If the plush location at the Marina Bay Sands hotel wasn’t incentive enough, there are four days packed with essential life sciences programming covering IT infrastructure, the cloud, clinical and cancer genomics, bioinformatics and more.

    May 1, 2013

  • It’s Time for Wheels on the Big Data Sports Car

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | Our ‘always-on’ digital world has made data a key resource which is fundamentally changing our lives. We’re swimming in it—oceans of it. So why are we still bemoaning a lack of open access to decision-making data and an innovation deficit? Big Data is here, so how do we make sense of this brave new world?

    Apr 30, 2013

  • NIH Seeks New ADDition in a Data Science Director

    Bio-IT World | BETHESDA, MD—With two weeks left to the application deadline, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is still searching for the ideal candidate to fill a plumb new job in biomedical data science.

    Apr 29, 2013