• 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

  • EMC Supports 4 TB Drives

    HPCwire | EMC today announced support for 4 terabyte drives for EMC Isilon's industry-leading scale-out NAS solutions.

    Feb 4, 2013

  • Opscode Releases Chef 11

    TechCrunch | Opscode has delivered Chef 11 with the help of Facebook. Chef 11 has been rewritten with the Erlang programming language and the PostgreSQL database.

    Feb 4, 2013

  • Courtagen Leverages Level 3 to Provide Direct Access to Amazon Cloud

    Bio-IT World | WOBURN, MASS.—Although it didn’t require digging up any local roads in the end, a small biotech company has struck a partnership in life sciences with Level 3 Communications to create a seamless and secure data link that pipes genomic data directly from its laboratory just outside Boston to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud facility in Ashburn, Northern Virginia.

    Feb 4, 2013

  • NetApp Eyes Opportunities in Health Care Data Storage

    Bio-IT World | Whatever happened to NetApp? When Bio-IT World launched in 2002, NetApp was one of the big names in big data storage in the biotech and life sciences arena. But over the past decade, while brand names such as Isilon, EMC, BlueArc, Quantum, Panasas, DDN and many others have cashed in on the data deluge, NetApp kept at best a very low profile in the space. But there are strong signs that NetApp is turning things around.

    Feb 1, 2013

  • Selventa Says Systems Diagnostics is Key to Harnessing Patient Data

    Bio-IT World | To hear any CEO claim that their company has become “the premier big data analytics company focused on personalized healthcare” might raise an eyebrow or two. When the company in question is a small software firm that underwent a name change just 18 months ago, that is certainly the case.

    Jan 31, 2013

  • Life Tech Helps ID Libyan Remains

    U-T San Diego | Life Technologies is assisting in an effort to identify tens of thousands of remains found in mass graves in Libya. Life Tech is donating infrastructure, including the expertise, training, and the forensic instruments and materials to validate the workflow and process DNA samples from about 20,000 people.

    Jan 30, 2013

  • PLOS and Dryad Assign DOIs to PLOS Genetics Articles

    PLOS Blog | PLOS and Dryad are expanding their integration to PLOS Genetics. The partnership applies data identiers (DOIs) to data "packages" associated with published articles so authors, editors, and readers can access underlying data along with the published results.

    Jan 30, 2013

  • Computational Challenges of Protein Function Prediction

    News Brief | A worldwide effort encompassing 102 researchers and students from 30 research groups working over 2 years tackled the computational challenges of protein function prediction. The results were published this week in Nature Methods.

    Jan 29, 2013