• Bio-It World Announces Winners of 2012 Best Practices Awards

    Bio-IT World | BOSTON—Bio-IT World announced the winners of its eighth Best Practices Awards competition this morning in a plenary session at the 2012 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. Grand Prize winners from five life sciences awards categories included entries from three big pharma companies—Merck, Pfizer, and Merck KGaA (Germany)—and two genomics organizations, BGI Shenzhen and the University of Utah/Omicia. 

    Apr 25, 2012

  • Lombardi Lays Out His Vision for Real Time Genomics

    Bio-IT World | BOSTON—Less than two weeks into his new position as CEO of Real Time Genomics (RTG), Steve Lombardi shared some of his early vision with Bio-IT World, judging this week’s conference to be the perfect venue to make the official announcement. 

    Apr 25, 2012

  • 10,000 Names In, What the Boycott Means for Elsevier, Open Access

    The Guardian | With more than 10,000 scientists pledging to boycott Elsevier on the Cost of Knowledge website, the site's creator, Tyler Neylon, talks about open access and what will come next for scientific publishing.

    Apr 25, 2012

  • Twitter Highlights from Bio-IT World Keynotes

    Bio-IT World | The 10th Anniversary of the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo kicked off yesterday evening. With over 2,500 registered attendees, the anniversary event is already proving to be a record breaker. Opening keynote presentations by Jill P. Mesirov, Associate Director and Chief Informatics Officer; Director, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Martin Leach, CIO, both of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard were chronicled by hundreds of tweets.

    Apr 24, 2012

  • Amazon Announces Asia Pac Beanstalk Expansion, Rumors of Data Centers in Sydney, Hong Kong

    Roundup | Amazon is expanding the availabilty of the AWS Elastic Beanstalk to Japan, making the service available to developers in the US East and now Asia Pacific regions, and Amazon's newest data centers are rumored to be in the works for Sydney and Hong Kong.

    Apr 23, 2012

  • 454, MiSeq, and PGM Go Head to Head

    Nature | A group of UK-based researchers compare the newest breed of sequencers: Roche’s 454 GS Junior, Illumina’s MiSeq and Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM). 

    Apr 23, 2012

  • The Foundation Approach to Drug Discovery

    The Atlantic | There's been much debate about the best drug discovery business model, with the weaknesses of both academia and pharma made painfully clear. But perhaps the best business model is being practiced by translation-focused disease foundations. 

    Apr 23, 2012

  • Human Genome Sciences Rejects GSK Offer

    Bloomberg BusinessWeek | In a second buyout rejection this week, Human Genome Sciences rejected a $2.59 billion acquisition bid from GlaxoSmithKline. The two companies currently partner on a lupus treatment. 

    Apr 19, 2012

  • Going Up: Cycle Launches 50,000-Core Utility Supercomputer in the Cloud

    Bio-IT World | In the latest in a string of cloud computing firsts, Cycle Computing has collaborated with Schrödinger and Nimbus Discovery to spin up a 50,000-core supercomputer in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. 

    Apr 19, 2012

  • GSK Signs $30m Deal for Asthma, COPD Drugs

    San Francisco Business Times | GlaxoSmithKline has signed a second collaboration with Five Prime Therapeutics to develop drugs for asthma and COPD. Five Prime is eligible to receive payments up to $30 million over the next four years.

    Apr 19, 2012

  • Illumina Holds On to Board of Directors, Company

    DealBook | Roche walked away from the table yesterday after Illumina shareholders voted to re-elect all of Illumina's directors by a large margin. On Wednesday, Illumina shares closed at $44.51, one cent higher than Roche's inital bid.

    Apr 19, 2012

  • Decision Day for Illumina, Roche

    Roundup | Today is Illumina's board meeting, and there is much theorizing about the outcome. After two rejected bids, Roche has nominated six directors and proposed expanding the Illumina board to 11 members. Illumina--along with two independent advisory firms--has recommended that shareholders vote for the four Illumina nominees.

    Apr 17, 2012

  • Wingu Announces Google Funding

    Digital Journal | Wingu, a developer of software designed to enhance the operational efficiency of pharmaceutical research and discovery, announced a Series A round of funding led by Google Ventures with additional investment from Borealis Ventures. 

    Apr 17, 2012

  • DecisionView’s Consortium Approach to Optimizing Enrollment

    eCliniqua | For industry leader Merck, country-specific and site-level performance metrics have been among the early wins from the DecisionView Enrollment Benchmarks data set, says Brendan O’Neill, Merck’s director and head of global trial optimization. The pharmaceutical giant last June joined peers GlaxoSmithKline and Roche in working with DecisionView to turn their combined operational patient enrollment data into a cross-industry set of clinical trial enrollment benchmarks. 

    Apr 17, 2012

  • Merck Acquires Cancer Drug Rights

    Reuters | Merck has acquired the rights to an Endocyte cancer drug candidate for $120 million and up to $880 million in milestone payments.

    Apr 17, 2012

  • Geneticists Respond to DNA Prediction Study

    UCSF | Genetics experts respond to recent press about the limits of personal genomics. In a nutshell: well duh! 

    Apr 17, 2012

  • Structure-Based Drug Design for Pharma

    Wall Street Journal | Computer-aided drug design (or structure-based design) is taking off in pharma with Pfizer, Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi all using structure-based design in recently launched or late-stage compounds.

    Apr 17, 2012

  • Customer Centricity in Life Sciences

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | A fundamental requirement for success in the life sciences industry is the ability to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with all customers (i.e. health care professionals and patients). In an ideal world, life sciences companies would have all the information about any given customer at their fingertips. However, even if this were possible, the information is of little value if you cannot utilize it to better serve your customers at the point of interaction, across all contact channels and organizational silos. 

    Apr 16, 2012

  • Data from the Real World

    Forbes | GNS Healthcare executives discuss "real world outcomes" in clinical trials and the concept of "always-on" trials that are constantly gathering data.

    Apr 12, 2012

  • Roche Says Illumina is Not Apple

    Wall Street Journal | With a week to go before Illumina's annual meeting, Roche sent another letter to shareholders yesterday assuring them that Illumina is not Apple. Illumina has made good use of a journalist's quote comparing the two companies, but Roche hopes to squelch such comparisons.

    Apr 12, 2012