• Genia Brin’s Double Parkinson’s Mutation

    Moment Magazine | Eugenia Brin,  mother of Google founder Sergey Brin, has an extremely rare form of Parkinson's disease -- she carries two copies of a faulty gene known as LRRK2.  

    Jul 10, 2012

  • A Preview of September’s Bio-IT World Cloud Summit

    Bio-IT World | This September, Bio-IT World will host its second annual Cloud Summit in San Francisco, expanded to feature three concurrent tracks – High-Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud-Optimized Networks, and Data-Focused Cloud Applications. Keynote presentations will be given by Miron Livny (University Wisconsin), Hugh Williams (eBay) and Vijay Pande (Stanford).

    Jul 9, 2012

  • Genetic Gamble: Whole Genome Sequencing and Cancer

    New York Times | Oncologist Lukas Wartman was facing certain death last fall, but today he is alive and doing well. Dr. Wartman is a pioneer in a new approach to stopping cancer -- the use of whole genome sequencing to reveal the telltale mutation(s) behind his unique form of the disease, followed by the use of a rational therapy -- in this case, a drug called Sutent.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • The FarGen Project: Sequencing the Genome of an Entire Population

    ScienceNordic | The FarGen project is preparing to sequence the genetic material of the entire 50,000 population of the Faroe Islands, and could become a model for personalised medicine throughout the world.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • U.S. Pushes for More Scientists, But the Jobs Aren’t There

    Washington Post | The Obama Administration has repeatedly called for American universities to churn out more scientists, but with U.S. drug firms slashing some 300,000 jobs since 2000, there are simply too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • Larry Smarr, the Measured Man

    The Atlantic | Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.

    Jul 6, 2012

  • Cloudera and Mount Sinai: The Structure of a Big Data Revolution?

    ZDNet | It's Big Data meets Multiscale Biology: Cloudera, the poster child of the Hadoop ecosystem, and the Mt Sinai School of Medicine Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, have announced a collaboration to solve medical challenges with Big Data.

    Jul 6, 2012

  • University of Oxford Launches Top GPU-Based Supercomputer

    TechWeek Europe | A consortium of UK academic institutions, led by the University of Oxford, has launched “Emerald” – the most powerful GPU-accelerated computer in the UK.

    Jul 5, 2012

  • DNA Mapping of Alzheimer’s Patients Gives Deep Dive View

    Bloomberg | Working with $2 million in new grants from the Alzheimer's Association and the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, researchers at the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative will start sequencing the DNA of 800 participants in a study attempting to find the root causes of memory loss. 

    Jul 5, 2012

  • How Darwin Can Fight Cancer

    Daily Telegraph | A new paper in Nature co-authored by Johns Hopkins molecular oncologist Bert Vogelstein and Harvard evolutionary expert Martin Nowak suggests a way to use the mathematics of evolution to predict the spread of cancer, and thereby treat it far more effectively.

    Jul 5, 2012

  • Tegal Shifts to Health Tech with CollabRx Acquisition

    North Bay Business Journal | Former semiconductor production equipment maker Tegal Corp. is transforming itself into a healthcare technology company with the deal to acquire gene-based cancer care information provider CollabRx and combine the two companies as CollabRx in San Francisco.

    Jul 3, 2012

  • Harvard's Boguski Rides Genomics' Third Wave

    GEN | A new health services business, Genome Health Solutions, co-founded by pathologist Mark Boguski and Richard Kellner, is looking to catch the emerging third wave in the clinical application of genomics by marrying knowledge of the clinical and technology market space.

    Jul 3, 2012

  • The Return of Finished Genomes: Hybrid Sequencing Strategy Boosts Pacific Biosciences Accuracy, Assembly

    Bio-IT World | Two new papers in Nature Biotechnology – one from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the other from Pacific Biosciences – demonstrate the value of combining long but relatively error-prone reads from a “3rd-generation” single-molecule instrument with the high-throughput, shorter “2nd-generation” read lengths from Illumina, marking a potential breakthrough in the quest for "finished genomes."  

    Jul 2, 2012

  • Bristol’s $5.3 Billion Amylin Deal Heralds Acquisition Hunger

    Bloomberg |  Bristol-Myers Squibb's $5.3 billion deal to buy diabetes drugmaker Amylin Pharmaceuticals is the largest for the pharmacuetical industry industry this year, and comes after the firm's top-selling drug, the blood- thinner Plavix, faced generic competition for the first time in May.

    Jul 2, 2012

  • Sophic Releases Cancer Biomarker Database

    Bio-IT World | Funded by a 3-year-SBIR grant from the NCI, Sophic has released a cancer biomarker database called SCan-Mark Explorer, focused on breast, ovarian, colon, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and melanoma. 

     

    Jul 2, 2012

  • Wellcome Trust Gets Tough With Grantees Who Spurn Open Access

    The Guardian | The Wellcome Trust, the wealthy British medical charity, says it will withhold researchers' final grant payments -- typically 10% of the total -- if they fail to publish their results in open access scientific journals.

    Jun 29, 2012

  • Data Tsunami: BGI Transfers Genomic Data Across Pacific at Nearly 10 Gigabits/Second

    Bio-IT World | During an event in Beijing last week,BGI transferred genomic data across the Pacific Ocean to UC Davis at a sustained rate of almost 10 Gigabits per second, speeds that according to Aspera CEO Michelle Munson mark "the fastest file transfers over public WAN at such distances using commodity hardware.”  

     

    Jun 29, 2012

  • Lawrence Livermore, IBM Offer Petascale Supercomputer to Industry

    HPC Wire | The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has announced that it is teaming up with IBM to form "Deep Computing Solutions," a collaboration that is being folded into LLNL’s new High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC).

    Jun 29, 2012

  • Synthetic Biology's Master Programmers

    Technology Review | For more than a decade, synthetic biologists have promised to revolutionize the way we produce fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It turns out, however, that programming new life forms is not so easy. Now some of these same scientists are turning back to nature for inspiration.

    Jun 28, 2012

  • Gates Foundation in Venture Capital Shift

    Financial Times | The Gates Foundation plans to take equity stakes in up to a dozen biotech companies this year, signalling a shift towards a “venture capital” approach at the world’s biggest philanthropic organisation.

    Jun 27, 2012