• 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

  • Curing Cancer By Throwing Spaghetti At The Wall

    Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider | You know scientists are getting desperate when National Cancer Institute (NCI) researchers publicly boast that their approach is not limited to the realm of rational behavior. Heck, as long as funding is infinite, why not keep going back to re-drill the same dry holes hoping dumb luck will produce a gusher? 

    Nov 30, 2012

  • Stanford Launches Genomics Center

    Stanford Daily | Stanford University is launching the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. The Center will reportedly specialize in the analysis of big data with a smaller emphasis on lab work.

    Nov 29, 2012

  • Leading Big Data Company Appistry Joins Genome Institute of Singapore to Accelerate Genomics in Asia

    Bio-IT World | On the heels of Appistry’s announcement with the Broad Institute as distributor of the GATK, the high-performance computing company announces a research collaboration with the Genome Institute of Singapore.  

    Nov 29, 2012

  • Numis Reiterates $2 Billion Valuation for Oxford Nanopore

    Bio-IT World | An analyst with Numis Securities in London has reiterated a $2-billion valuation for Oxford Nanopore, even before the sequencing company has commercially launched, based on its assessment of the medical market and an evaluation of one of the British sequencing company’s major investors, the publicly traded IP Group. 

    Nov 29, 2012

  • The New Manhattan Project: Q&A with NYGC Scientific Director Robert Darnell

    Bio-IT World | Rockefeller University physician scientist Robert Darnell, son of Lasker Award winner James Darnell, is the newly appointed scientific director of the New York Genome Center (NYGC). Darnell gives his first in-depth interview to Bio-IT World editor Kevin Davies on his reasons for taking the job and his initial goals for the high-profile center.

    Nov 27, 2012

  • Making Use of Smarter, Richer Data

    GEN | Getting the big data is the easy part, making sense of it is the challenge for life sciences. Guy Cavet, vice president of life sciences at Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions, argues for not just big data, but smarter use of rich data.

    Nov 27, 2012

  • Illumina, BGI Battle Over Complete Genomics

    Nature News | The fight for Complete Genomics is not over. BGI and Illumina have both submitted letters arguing that their offer is a better fit to the Complete Genomics board.

    Nov 27, 2012

  • Biotech's Class of 2012

    Xconomy | Where are the biotech startups for 2012? Xconomy finds them few and far between. Listing "exciting" startups as those with a big idea and at least $5 million in their pockets, Luke Timmerman comes up with only 28.

    Nov 27, 2012

  • ClickClinica App Tracks Global Disease

    Guardian | Liverpool University has launched a free app for doctors that records what symptoms their patient has and the treatment they provided. Collect enough of these together, from around the world, and you get real-time global disease surveillance.

    Nov 27, 2012

  • Novartis Calls for Better R&D Processes in the UK

    The Telegraph | Novartis has arranged a crisis meeting for British stakeholders in London today in a bid to "streamline Britain’s 'haphazard' approach to medical research and development (R&D)."

    Nov 26, 2012

  • HHMI Launches Film Studio

    HHMI | The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is expanding its focus--into film. HHMI today announced the launch of Tangled Bank Studios, a film and media production company for science documentaries.

    Nov 26, 2012

  • Panasas on Hadoop

    Datanami | Panasas believes high performance network attached storage (NAS) can offer some rather appealing features for the MapReduce world.

    Nov 26, 2012

  • Krams: How to Popularize the Adaptive Approach

    Bio-IT World  | Adaptive clinical trials might be globally embraced if the current preoccupation with fixed trial designs was viewed as an “engineering problem” requiring a lot of talk and teamwork between adaptive design experts, said Michael Krams, MD, vice president & head of the neurology franchise at Johnson & Johnson (J&J).  

    Nov 21, 2012

  • Bio-IT World Expo Announces 2013 Keynote Speakers

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World has announced a pair of renowned keynote speakers and an exciting panel of life science CIOs among the upcoming attractions at its 2013 Conference & Expo, to be held in Boston next Spring (April 9-11, 2013).

    Nov 20, 2012