• 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

  • SGI Releases Flexible, NAS Solution

    Bio-IT World | SGI released SGI NAS yesterday, a full-featured, flexible enterprise-class open storage solution. SGI NAS fully integrated with the SGI Modular InfiniteStorage product family, and can start small and yet scale to multiple petabytes of unified storage according to business demands. 

    Apr 11, 2012

  • A Look at Genomic Health and Its CEO

    Peninsula Press | Genomic Health's CEO is as invested in her team and her company as she is in patients. The company is pairing sequencing with diagnostics.

    Apr 11, 2012

  • Genomics and the Cloud: a Match Made in Heaven?

    Wired | When Amazon and the National Institutes of Health announced that all of the data from the 1000 Genomes Project would go into the Amazon Cloud, freely accessible to the public, that was just the beginning.

    Apr 11, 2012

  • Singapore Researchers Identify 600 New Mutated Genes in Stomach Cancer

    Bio-IT World | SINGAPORE—Researchers in Singapore have identified over 600 previously unknown genes mutated in stomach cancer. Their findings were published online in Nature Genetics on April 8. 

    Apr 9, 2012

  • Wellcome Trust Throws Weight Behind Open Access Campaign

    The Guardian | The Wellcome Trust has joined the "academic spring"--an open access campaign lobbying for all research papers to be shared, saying that it will soon adopt more stringent methods to ensure that all of the research it funds is freely available to the public within six months of first publication. 

    Apr 9, 2012

  • LiquidGrids Scans Social Media for Pharma Keywords

    Xconomy | LiquidGrids re-launched its business and overhauled its technology at the end of March to carry out data mining on social media sites for pharma companies. The goal is to identify trends and help customers take advantage of marketing opportunities in social media.

    Apr 9, 2012

  • Academic Research Largely Not Reproducible

    The Hook | A new Nature commentary finds that 9 of 10 pre-clinical cancer research studies cannot be replicated. Amgen researchers tried to confirm the findings of published academic research, and could only do so in 6 of the 53 papers they considered.

    Apr 8, 2012

  • Third-Party Firm Sides With Illumina

    Barron's | Shareholder advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services has spoken up for Illumina in the Illumina-Roche standoff.

    Apr 8, 2012

  • Takeda Joins Structural Genomics Consortium

    News Brief | Takeda Pharmaceutical has joined the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private partnership that supports the discovery of new medicines through open access research. Takeda's contribution raises the SGC's funds to $50 million.

    Apr 6, 2012