• Janssen Launches Clinical Trial Investigator Database

    eCliniqua | Janssen Research & Development has established a global cross-pharma Investigator Databank designed to improve efficiencies of industry-sponsored clinical trials. The effort is part of the newly-created TransCelerate BioPharma. 

    Nov 15, 2012

  • Digital Body Plots Pains, Prescriptions

    Startupticker | A new personal health record gives users a virtual body model to track their personal health history. Nhumi users tag free text with 3D coordinates recorded on a virtual model of the human anatomy by simply clicking on the body, creating a pin, then dragging the pin to their text.

    Nov 15, 2012

  • Wash U Receives $50m NIH Translational Science Grant

    Phys.org | Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has received a $50 million grant from NIH to help speed the translation of scientific discoveries into improvements in human health. The grant will reportedly help Washington University pursue the goals of the BioMed 21 initiative to encourage cross-disciplinary and translational research.

    Nov 14, 2012

  • Gen9 Announces Winners of Synthetic DNA Contest

    Bio-IT World | Gen9, a developer of scalable technologies for synthesizing and assembling DNA, today announced the five winners of its inaugural G-Prize contest. Collectively, the awardees stand to receive more than 1 million base pairs of DNA manufactured with Gen9’s unique next-generation gene synthesis technology.

    Nov 14, 2012

  • Natera's Prenatal Secret Sauce

    Bio-IT World | When it comes to prenatal testing, it’s a numbers game. Low risk, hormone-based tests are unreliable. The tests have false positive rates of 5%, which means over 120,000 women each year get positive results—high risk results—leading to high stress situations and unnecessary amniocenteses. The flip side is a false negative rate of 15%. Women get the all clear, when in fact something is wrong. Jonathan Sheena, Natera’s Chief Technology Officer, minces no words. “Those numbers are not suitable for this century.”

    Nov 14, 2012

  • Complete Genomics Rejects Counter Bid

    Bio-IT World | Complete Genomics received an unsolicited counter bid on November 5 that could have disrupted the firm's ongoing acquisition by BGI. The bid, from "Party H", was for $3.30 per share, 5% more than the BGI offer price, however Complete Genomics rejected the offer on November 8.

    Nov 14, 2012

  • Algorithm to Decrease Needed Number of ALS Clinical Trial Patients

    San Francisco Business Times | A Stanford University team won $200,000 in the Prize4Life competition for an algorithm to reduce the number of patients in ALS trials.

    Nov 13, 2012

  • Intel Shipping GPU-Competitor Chips: Xeon Phi

    PC Magazine | On Monday, Intel announced it is shipping its Xeon Phi products--a product line specifically targeting competition from NVIDIA and AMD. The Xeon Phi chips are packaged on discrete graphics-like cards and are built to work with Intel's Xeon E5 family of server and workstation CPUs.

    Nov 13, 2012

  • Computational Approach Shows Links Between Schizophrenia, Autism Gene Networks

    Zee News | Using a sophisticated approach, researchers at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Columbia Initiative in Systems Biology at Columbia University Medical Center showed linkages between gene mutations associated with schizophrenia and autism.

    Nov 12, 2012

  • Titan Tops Top500 List in Latest Supercomputer Rankings

    Bio-IT World | Weighing in at an impressive 17.59 petaflops, the new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee has claimed the top slot at the first attempt in the latest Top500 world supercomputing rankings published today. 

    Nov 12, 2012

  • Genomics News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | With the American Society of Human Genetics conference ongoing in San Francisco this week, there’s been a flood of genomics products and news, announced at the event and elsewhere. 

    Nov 9, 2012

  • FDA Releases New IT Strategic Plan

    FDA Blog | Eric Perakslis, FDA’s Chief Information Officer and Chief Scientist for Informatics, reveals the FDA’s new FDA Information Management Strategic Plan this morning in a blog. There is still much to be done to modernize information technology at FDA, Perakslis says.

    Nov 9, 2012

  • Cray Acquires Appro for Cluster Computing, Increases I/O for New Line

    Bio-IT World Roundup | Cray has signed an agreement to acquire Appro International for $25 million to create a cluster business. The company also discussed a new interconnect, Aries, that will feature a new routing topology that together promise to dramatically improve internal bandwidth.

    Nov 9, 2012

  • Interpretation and Assembly: New and Needed in Genomics

    Nature Biotechnology | The biggest challenges in genomics now lie in interpretation and assembly. There's been a lot of progress, but there's also more to go. Ten experts discuss the advances and the needs to manage the millions of genomes soon to be sequenced.

    Nov 9, 2012

  • American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Condemns Gene Patent Monopolies

    Bio-IT World | Yesterday, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) released an official position statement condemning gene patent monopolies that have allowed some to develop proprietary databases of the clinical meaning of the variants in particular genes.   

    Nov 8, 2012

  • Sequencing Reveals Gene Regulation in E. Coli

    Bio-IT World | Eric Schadt and colleagues at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School have used single-molecule real-time (SMRT) DNA sequencing to determine mechanisms of gene regulation in the E. coli bacteria involved in the deadly outbreak in Germany in May-June 2011. Published online today in Nature Biotechnology, the findings provide novel insights on the role of epigenetic DNA base modifications in driving molecular processes of the E. coli strain. 

    Nov 8, 2012

  • Brigham and Women’s Team Wins Clinical Genome CLARITY Challenge

    Bio-IT World | SAN FRANCISCO—A team of computational biologists and clinical geneticists from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has won the inaugural CLARITY Challenge to identify and present the putative mutations underlying the rare disorders of three children or infants who have received care at Boston Children’s Hospital and had their full genomes sequenced.

    Nov 7, 2012

  • Secure Genomics in the Cloud

    SmartPlanet | Scott Megill, CIO for the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, and Dan Pelino, General Manager of IBM’s Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry group, offer up the case for putting genomic data in the cloud.

    Nov 6, 2012

  • High School Student Wins Science Prize

    Huffington Post | 17-year-old Angela Zhang created a nanoparticle that can detect cancer cells, eradicate the cancer cells and then monitor the treatment response.

    Nov 6, 2012

  • How to Design a Better Double Helix

    Bio-IT World | The Double Helix by James D. Watson is not merely a magnificent scientific detective story but one of the classics of 20th century literature. Inspired by the discovery of the lost correspondence of Francis Crick a few years ago, two veteran Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory faculty decided to produce an enhanced edition of the book. On the eve of publication, Bio-IT World invited the editors of the new book, Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski, to discuss the background to the project and preview some of the treasures within.

    Nov 6, 2012