• 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

  • BitSpeed Pushes Software Solutions for High-Speed Data Transfer

    Bio-IT World | Transporting big data is a big problem, but an LA-based start-up called BitSpeed believes its software tools, based on TCP (transmission control protocol), can provide a viable and cost-effective solution for life sciences organizations.

    Feb 7, 2013

  • Cycle Computing CTO James Cuff on Clouds, On-Demand Computing and Package Holidays

    Bio-IT World | The new Chief Technology Officer at Cycle Computing, James Cuff, spent the past seven years as working “at the interface of science and advanced computing technologies,” providing a breadth of high-performance computing, storage and software expertise, all the while striving to manage a monstrous surge in data. In his new position, Cuff aims to apply some of his insights and ideas to an even bigger canvas. Cuff spoke to Bio-IT World editor Kevin Davies and shared his views about big data, cloud computing, and the future of research computing.

    Feb 6, 2013

  • Pan-European Biological Infrastructure Director Named

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Niklas Blomberg has been named the Founding Director of ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for biological information that officially entered its implementation phase in January 2013.

    Feb 6, 2013

  • Dell's Buyout to Open Doors for HP?

    Computerworld | When Dell finalized its buyout, it opening the door for HP to take over customers, HP said yesterday in a statement. The statement comes amid rumors that HP's board is also considering major changes to the company.

    Feb 6, 2013

  • Merck Shares Fall After Q4 Reports

    Philly.com | Merck has been downgraded by analysts due to struggles with Vytorin and Zocor. Q4 results announced last week raised questions about the drugs success and led to a 2.3% fall in share places.

    Feb 5, 2013

  • IBM Moves Watson Technology to Servers

    Computerworld | IBM is moving some of the hardware and software technology behind Watson to the company's new Power Express servers. Companies can use the new servers to analyze warehouses of data, and to answer complex queries with high levels of confidence.

    Feb 5, 2013