• Open Science, Open Data, Open Access

    Bio-IT World | BOSTON–In two compelling presentations at the Bio-IT World Conference* last week, Atul Butte and Steven Salzberg provided formidable advocacy for the virtues of open data and open science.

    Apr 16, 2013

  • BGI's Kung Fu Aspirations

    Asian Scientist | If BGI had a representative mascot, what would it be? The kung fu panda, naturally. Why? "It is humble, nice, good-looking, cute, soft, but knows kung fu," Wang Jun explains.

    Apr 16, 2013

  • IBM's Billion Dollar Flash Investment

    eWeek | Last week IBM announced a $1 billion investment in flash-based storage for servers, storage systems, and middleware. Big Blue also announced a line of products called FlashSystem and 12 new Centers of Competency around flash storage.

    Apr 15, 2013

  • US Government Not Targeting Exascale Computing

    HPC Wire | The federal R&D budget numbers did not save room for exascale computing. Many had expected the exascale goal to be quietly shelved in light of the sequester, but there were some compute budget gains.

    Apr 15, 2013

  • Thermo Fisher Buys Life Tech for $13.6 Billion

    Forbes | Thermo Fisher Scientific agreed this morning to buy Life Technologies in a $13.6 billion deal or $76/share. It's the largest acquisition ever for Thermo Fisher.

    Apr 15, 2013

  • April 11: News and Notes from the Expo Floor

    Bio-IT World | The 2013 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo closed yesterday--an energetic three days as members from the life sciences and biotech industries convened in Boston. With over 125 exhibitors and 12 tracks, the event is fully-packed. Here are some highlights from a very busy Expo floor.

    Apr 12, 2013

  • Obama’s BRAIN Waves

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | Some three decades ago, a distinguished physiologist suggested that we needed new technologies to record many neurons in parallel. It did not take much imagination to realize that what would be illuminatory with many neurons would be revelatory for the whole brain. This month, President Obama announced the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, and proponents of the idea hope it will be just that.

    Apr 10, 2013

  • 2013 Bio-IT World Best of Show Winners Named

    Bio-IT World  | The Bio-IT World Best of Show Awards were announced tonight at the 2013 Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston. New products were recognized from ePharmaSolutions, Bright Computing, Seven Bridges Genomics, and Biofortis.

    Apr 10, 2013

  • 2013 Best Practices Awards Winners Named

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World announced the winners of its ninth Best Practices Awards competition this morning in a plenary session at the 2013 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. Grand prize winners were named in four life sciences categories highlighting best practices in genomics, cloud computing, big data in disease research, and big pharma data management. In addition, a Judges’ Prize and Editors’ Choice Award were given.

    Apr 10, 2013

  • Early News and Notes from the Expo Floor

    Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo begins in Boston this afternoon, and the Expo hall has been bustling as the more than 125 exhibiting companies set up their booths. Here are just some of the early news and announcements coming off the Expo floor so far.

    Apr 9, 2013

  • Better Integrating Pharma with CRO Partners

    Bio-IT World | Contributed Commentary | Today’s pharmaceutical industry embraces the electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) as a staple within its labs. Deployments have helped reduce paper, generate efficiencies, provide greater visibility to data, drive standardization and increase collaboration. Within major pharmaceutical companies, the ELN has been a tremendous tool for driving productivity and accelerating the discoveries that speed new and improved drugs to market. Our next focus, as ELN vendors, must be to improve the integration of electronic data capture and sharing with our pharmaceutical customers’ external client systems.

    Apr 9, 2013

  • Ingenuity, Affymetrix Co-Promote Tools

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ingenuity Systems and Affymetrix have announced that they will co-promote Ingenuity iReport with Affymetrix expression microarray products, coupling statistical analysis and biological interpretation workflow with a gene expression platform.

    Apr 8, 2013

  • Google Offers IaaS to Gold Support Customers

    eWeek | Google is granting access to its Google Compute Engine cloud environment, offering infrastructure-as-a-service. The access is for customers of its Gold Support package.

    Apr 8, 2013

  • Arpeggi’s Harmonious Approach to NGS Data Analysis

    Bio-IT World | While there has been considerable focus of late on new bioinformatics approaches and platforms for the downstream interpretation of genome sequences in a clinical context, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve the quality and consistency of next-gen sequencing variant calling and read alignment. Arpeggi, co-founded by CEO Nir Leibovich, hopes to interface with the community to help establish standards and best practices for NGS data analysis. Bio-IT World editor Kevin Davies recently asked Leibovich to outline his company’s core strengths and business proposition.

    Apr 7, 2013

  • Life Sciences Survey Reveals IT Outlooks and Plans for 2013

    Bio-IT World | The first in an annual series, Bio-IT World's 2013 Life Sciences IT Survey captures a host of trends in bio-IT for the coming year. The forecast: increasing budgets, almost certain data increases, and more clouds.

    Apr 4, 2013

  • New Life Tech Products Use Compendia Gene Database

    Bio-IT World Product Briefs | Life Technologies Corporation announced two new offerings this morning that give users access to the large genomics database compiled by Compendia Biosciences, which the company acquired in October 2012.

    Apr 4, 2013

  • Pfizer and BIND Therapeutics Sign Nanotech Drug Deal

    Boston Globe | BIND Therapeutics (recently rechristened from BIND Biosciences) has signed a $160 million per drug collaboration with Pfizer to develop targeted medicines with nanotechnology.

    Apr 3, 2013

  • From Junk DNA to Junk Economics: Beware the Inexorable Sovietization of Big Science

    Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider |The controversy surrounding the $400-million Encode project’s dubious public relations claims surrounding the function of ‘junk DNA’ and the Battelle Institute’s defense of the $3-billion Human Genome Project (HGP) as economically beneficial (as cited in the recent State of the Union address) make this a good time to examine President Obama’s attempts to bring more of American science under centralized direction and control.

    Apr 3, 2013

  • The Most Dangerous Words in Genetics

    Wired | Geneticist Steve Jones captures the most dangerous words in genetics: "the gene for."

    Apr 2, 2013

  • Obama Launches Brain Map

    New York Times | Following hints of the announcement after his State of the Union address in January, President Obama will today formally launch the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short.

    Apr 2, 2013