• 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

  • George Scangos and Biogen Comeback

    Forbes | Two years in, George Scangos is leading leads Biogen Idec's comeback story. He's cut costs and jobs and moved away from cancer research, but has invested in neuroscience and hemophilia.

    Dec 5, 2012

  • Boston Health System Launches Sequencing at Nine Hospitals

    Boston Globe | Partners HealthCare System in Boston is launching a whole genome sequencing and interpretation service for patients at its nine hospitals across Eastern Massachusetts.

    Dec 5, 2012

  • Freely Available ALS Database Launched Today

    Bio-IT World | A new patient database launched today containing clinical trial records from more than 8,500 ALS patients. 

    Dec 5, 2012

  • AMD's New Processors Target the Cloud

    Computerworld | AMD has introduced low-power Opteron processors targeted for Cloud use to power Web transactions: the Opteron 4300 and 3300 chips.

    Dec 4, 2012

  • GPUs Model Maturation of HIV

    Bio-IT World | Thanks to a distributed computing platform of NVIDIA GPUs, bioinformaticians at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) and UPF (Pompeu Fabra University) have used molecular simulation to explain a specific step in the maturation of HIV. The results were published in the most recent issue of PNAS.  

    Dec 3, 2012

  • Sequencing Reveals Novel Mutations in Childhood Cancer

    Science Codex | Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have identified mutations in two related genes involved in neuroblastoma. The work was published yesterday in Nature Genetics.

    Dec 3, 2012

  • Flash Memory Gets Heat Shock Healing

    BBC | Flash memory is fast, but it's long been known to have reliability issues after about 10,000 read/write cycles. Researchers in Taiwan have now shown that a 800C jolt of heat can "heal" the memory, making it good for up to 100 million cycles.

    Dec 3, 2012

  • Adaptive Study Design May Become Survival Tactic

    Bio-IT World | In the not-so-distant future, the pharmaceutical industry will need to move away from serendipity and its “blockbuster” drug development approach to become a service-based business specializing in patient-specific therapeutics delivering desired outcomes at the desired price. Clinical trials, of necessity, will be re-engineered to reflect real-world circumstances and turn adaptive study programs into a competitive advantage. Practicing clinicians will be dissuaded from using high-cost medicines and more actively participate in modeling and simulation exercises to help get better products to patients sooner.

    Dec 3, 2012

  • Randy Scott: Bringing Metcalfe’s Law to Genomic Medicine

    Bio-IT World | BOSTON—Receiving the 2012 Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award from the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC), Randy Scott reflected on his success as the founder and former CEO of Genomic Health, but also looked ahead to new opportunities with his latest venture, InVitae Corporation.  

    Nov 30, 2012

  • HHMI Names New Vice President, CSO

    HHMI | The Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have elected Professor Erin K. O’Shea, Ph.D., now a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Harvard University, as Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer.

    Nov 30, 2012

  • Amazon Launches Redshift Data Warehouse

    eWeek | Amazon Web Services launched a cloud data warehouse earlier in the week. Redshift is a petabyte-scale data warehouse service that provides a fast and powerful solution that increases the speed of query performance.

    Nov 30, 2012