• Ten Rules for Open Source Software Development

    PLOS Computational Biology | In a paper published earlier this month in PLOS Computational Biology, Andreas Prlić of the San Diego Supercomputing Center and James B. Procter of the University of Dundee lay out ten simple rules for open development of scientific software. Among them: Don't Reinvent the Wheel; Be Your Own User; Nurture Your Community; and Science Counts.

    Dec 14, 2012

  • BGI-Complete Deal Continues to Raise Questions

    Bio-IT World Roundup | The BGI-Complete Genomics deal continues to stir controversy. Yesterday, Michael Wessel and Larry Wortzel, congressionally-appointed members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, raised national security concerns about the deal. Complete Genomics' CEO Cliff Reid answered their claims--and others proposed by Illumina--in a memo this morning to Complete Genomics' staff.

    Dec 14, 2012

  • Overselling the Genomics Revolution

    Globe and Mail | Are the promises of personalized genomics being oversold? We are not in a personalized medicine revolution, Timothy Caulfield contends. Overhyping the promise, "can hurt the science, by creating unrealistic expectations, and distract us from other, more effective areas of health promotion."

    Dec 14, 2012

  • Andrew Hopkins and Algorithmic Drug Design

    BBC | University of Dundee researchers are applying advanced statistics and data analysis to drug discovery. Andrew Hopkins, Chair of Medicinal Informatics at Dundee, says he and his colleagues have "effectively proved the concept of automated design of new compounds showing that by using algorithms to process massive amounts of data, we can tackle problems of huge complexity."

    Dec 13, 2012

  • Population Diagnostics Aids Identification of Autism CNVs

    Bio-IT World | A small biotech company, Population Diagnostics (PDx), has collaborated with researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (SickKids) to provide a potentially major step forward in the search for a diagnostic test for autism. 

    Dec 13, 2012

  • Complete Genomics and China's Ulterior Motives

    Mercury News | Michael Wessel and Larry Wortzel, congressionally-appointed members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, recommend the utmost scrutiny of the BGI-Complete Genomics deal on national security grounds.

    Dec 13, 2012

  • AWS Recognizes Innovative Uses of Spot Instances

    eWeek | Amazon Web Services announced the winners of its first annual Spotathon event last week. The competition recognized innovative uses of Spot instances to help small companies achieve massive scale and save time and money.

    Dec 12, 2012

  • 2012's Best Biotech CEOs

    The Street| The Street has nominated four biotech CEOs for the title of Best Biotech CEO of 2012: the heads of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Gilead Sciences, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Sarepta Therapeutics.

    Dec 11, 2012

  • Big Claims, Big Promise?

    Technology Review | Moderna Therapeutics has billed itself the next Genentech. It's raised more than $40 milion and has attracted some big names for its Scientific Advisory Board. But questions remain about the company's RNA technology.

    Dec 11, 2012

  • Complete Collection of SureChem Patent Chemistry Available in PubChem

    SureChem Blog | More than 8 million SureChem structures are now available in PubChem, the world's largest free public chemistry database. The structures come from US, EP, and WO patents, and Japan patent abstracts. More than 4 million are unique to SureChem.

    Dec 11, 2012

  • What Amgen's deCODE Purchase Means for Drug Discovery

    Xconomy | Does Amgen's purchase of deCODE present a model for counteracting failure rates in drug discovery. Terry McGuire points out: "Amgen acquired deCODE for more than its patents, genetic testing business, or drug development projects..."

    Dec 10, 2012

  • Amgen Buys deCODE

    Deal Book | Amgen announced this morning that it would buy Icelandic personal genomics pioneer deCODE for $415 million in cash. deCODE has been plagued by financial woes for years, even while it published genetic discoveries.

    Dec 10, 2012

  • Does Whole Genome Sequencing Circumvent Gene Patents?

    Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | What happens when, during the course of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) a patient or research subject, an investigator sequences and analyzes a disease gene that has been patented? The U.S. Supreme Court will shed some light on this question next year when it issues its ruling in the long-running Myriad Genetics saga. 

    Dec 10, 2012

  • European Universities, Companies Launch Stem Cell Bank

    Wall Street Journal | Roche and Oxford University are leading the push to build the world's largest repository of induced pluripotent stem cells. Ten drug companies and 23 universities have joined to launch StemBANCC.

    Dec 7, 2012

  • The 1000 Genomes Project and Not-So-Rare Rare Mutations

    NY Genome | The 1000 Genomes project is revealing not-so-rare rare mutations. Of the 1,092 people from 14 populations currently sequenced, more than expected carry rare variations. Researcher theorize that the rate of population growth has exceeded the rate at which natural selection can remove problematic alleles.

    Dec 7, 2012

  • Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD: Battle of the Accelerators

    HPC Wire | The competition for the newest high performance computing chips is heating up. Intel is shipping its Xeon Phi GPU competitior chips. NVIDIA has launched a new line of Kepler GPUs. And AMD has  anew FirePro S10000 graphics card.

    Dec 7, 2012

  • BIOBASE to Distribute ANNOVAR Commercially

    Herald Online | BIOBASE, in agreement the University of Southern California, and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, will now distribute ANNOVAR, a tool for annotation of genomic variants, to commercial users as a standalone product or complement to Genome Trax.

    Dec 6, 2012

  • Disease- vs Target-Based Drug Discovery

    Pharmalot | The former head of psychopharmacology at Boehringer Ingelheim, Frank Sams-Dodd, talks about the reason for pharma's decreased productivity, and the ways drug discovery are done that contribute to the problem.

    Dec 6, 2012

  • Uber-Cloud Experiment Provides Insight into Computing-as-a-Service

    Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | After a fast-paced three months, Round 1 of the Uber-Cloud Experiment concluded last month, revealing roadblocks in the computing-as-a-service landscape, solutions, and setting the stage for Round 2, which launched December 1. 

    Dec 6, 2012

  • Leveraging Private Cloud Technologies to Improve Prior Investments in Semantic Technologies and Data Warehouses

    Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | Pharmaceutical R&D divisions normally possess a significant amount of warehoused legacy data that bears directly on other areas of the enterprise, where a better understanding and reuse of data can be beneficial from a cost and productivity standpoint. Getting that data out of legacy  systems can be difficult, which is one of the reasons that semantic technologies have been sought. Now Cloud technologies can be leveraged to improve the computational issues facing semantic systems.

    Dec 5, 2012