• No Nanopores but AGBT 2013 Showcases Plenty of New NGS Technology

    Bio-IT World | The 2013 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference—likened by one participant as “the bastard child of a Gordon Conference and a Las Vegas Porn Convention"—may have lacked the show-stopping presentation of an Oxford Nanopore this year, but there was plenty to admire on the new technology front.

    Feb 25, 2013

  • Eric Lander Takes on the Internet for Reddit

    Reddit | Yesterday Eric Lander, President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, spent a couple of hours on Reddit doing an AMA open Q&A session. Questions ranged from the ridiulous to the profound, but Lander was a good sport. He weighed in on what to do to increase the attractiveness of PhD programs; the current most important scientific questions; the coolest discoveries in the 21st century; immortality; his mustache; genetics in 10-20 years; and more.

    Feb 22, 2013

  • IVF Clinic Deploys Ion Torrent Sequencing in Embryo Screening

    Bio-IT World | A reproductive clinic in New Jersey has successfully used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to screen embryos conceived in otherwise routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) cases prior to implantation. The news was reported in a talk yesterday evening at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference by Dagan Wells, a geneticist at the University of Oxford.

    Feb 22, 2013

  • N-of-One Announces First Provider Partnership with Fox Chase Cancer Center

    Bio-IT World | Following a flagship collaboration with Foundation Medicine to provide interpretative software for genome analysis in cancer patients, N-of-One has announced a new partnership with the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

    Feb 21, 2013

  • Eleven Winners Named for Breakthrough Prize

    New York Times | Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg have announced the winners of the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Eleven scientists were awarded $3 million each for their work.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • NetApp Announces New Storage Options

    eWeek |  In a media event yesterday, NetApp unveiled its first all-solid-state array, a new flash accelerator for servers, and a future new storage line coming out in 2014.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • Fruitful Market: Berry Genomics Tackles Prenatal Testing in China

    Bio-IT World | Seventeen million babies are born each year in China. Yet in 2010, the country only had the capacity to offer 150,000 amniocenteses a year. As the most populous country in the world with a well-established one child policy, that number is astonishingly low. And it represents a ripe market for the next generation of prenatal testing. Now Berry Genomics, co-founded by Daixing Zhou, is hoping to capitalize on the market in China.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • Coriell Life Sciences Launches Gene Vault Service

    Technology Review | Coriell Life Sciences--a startup from a partnership between Coriell Institute for Medical Research and IBM--aims to facilitate genomics in the clinic. The company plans to offer sequencing, data storage in a "gene vault", and data delivery in an electronic medical record.

    Feb 19, 2013

  • DREAM Project and Sage Bionetworks Join Forces

    Bio-IT World | Sage Bionetworks and the DREAM Project— Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—are merging efforts to run open science computational challenges which foster the broader collaboration of the research community and provide a meaningful impact to both discovery and clinical research.

    Feb 19, 2013

  • The Staffing Contradictions in Biotech

    Xconomy | After layoffs in the 150,000 range from 2009-2012, pharma and biotech are lamenting their lack of qualified workers to grow their businesses.

    Feb 18, 2013

  • Ion Torrent Edges Illumina in Sales Battle of Benchtop Sequencers, Says Macquarie Report

    Bio-IT World | Sales of the Ion Torrent desktop sequencers exceed those of its rival MiSeq machine from Illumina, according to a new report from Macquarie Equities Research, which highlights encouraging trends for both Illumina and Ion Torrent parent company, Life Technologies.

    Feb 18, 2013

  • PeerJ Rolls Out New Open Access Journal, Platform

    Bio-IT World Roundup | This week, PeerJ published its first articles--on sauropod necks, the cups and balls trick, anti-apoptotic signaling in mammalian hibernation and more. The scientific publishing site is more than just an open access publisher. PeerJ has built an innovative platform from scratch.

    Feb 15, 2013

  • AWS Data Warehouse Now Available

    Computerworld | Amazon Web Services has released its cloud-based data warehouse Redshift to all users. Redshift users can provison a single 2TB data warehouse or as a cluster of 16 2TB nodes or 16TB nodes, by default.

    Feb 15, 2013

  • The Genomics Tipping Point

    Wired | Genomics is poised for a "cell phone moment," Wired says--the tipping point where the technology becomes a commodity, hardware is cheap, and software and apps drives the industry.

    Feb 15, 2013

  • sbv IMPROVER Launches Species Translation Challenge

    Bio-IT World | sbv IMPROVER announced its next challenge today at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco. The Species Translation Challenge is an open scientific challenge that will use crowdsourcing to help define the limits of rodent models as predictors of human biology. The challenge will launch later in 2013.

    Feb 14, 2013

  • Cancer Commons Expands Pre-Competitive Alliance

    Bio-IT World | Cancer Commons has announced six new cancer ecosystem Alliance members: Knight Diagnostic Laboratories at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU); the Thoracic Oncology Program, University of Chicago Medicine; Science Exchange, an online marketplace for scientific services; and patient advocates the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, Imerman Angels, and Melanoma Research Foundation.

    Feb 13, 2013

  • Nominations Open For 2013 Franklin Award

    Bio-IT World | Bioinformatics.org is accepting nominations now for the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. The award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences. Nominations are being accepted until Monday, February 18.

    Feb 13, 2013

  • Latest Look at BGI

    Technology Review | Behind the doors in Shenzhen, 1,000 bioinformaticians are working on 2,000 human genomes, 90 varietys of chickpea, and a host of other grand projects.

    Feb 12, 2013

  • Sanofi Buys More Regeneron Biotech Stocks

    Reuters | Sanofi is buying more shares of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, its current partner on cholesterol and rheumatoid arthritis. Sanofi currently controls 16.7% of the company but has the right to control up to 30%.

    Feb 12, 2013

  • Strand Gets Burrill Seal of Approval

    Bio-IT World | Strand Life Sciences is no biotech newcomer, but the Bangalore, India-based company is getting a burst of new attention after San Francisco-based Burrill & Company today announced a multi-million dollar investment in the company. The new funds will be used to accelerate the growth of the company's evolution into precision diagnostics in health care and expand Strand's reach into global markets, the company says.

    Feb 11, 2013