• Texas Congressman Seeks to Block FDA Regulating Genetic Tests

    The Hill | Letting the FDA regulate genetic tests would cripple innovation in a field with tremendous promise for patients and U.S. competitiveness, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said last week at a policy forum co-sponsored by the American Clinical Laboratory Association.

    Nov 21, 2011

  • Open Data and Patient Modeling in Europe

    Bio-IT World | HANNOVER, GERMANY—“The tools and library situation in bioinformatics is an open-source zoo,” said Misha Kapushesksy, functional genomics team leader with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), during his presentation on the Gene Expression Atlas platform. If that’s so, attendees got quite a tour of menagerie at the third annual Bio-IT World Europe conference*, with much emphasis on open-source platforms and cloud deployments.   

     

    Nov 21, 2011

  • Notes from the Floor: SC11

    Bio-IT World | This week’s Supercomputing 11 (SC11) conference in Seattle was full of news and product announcements across the industry, many of which featured companies active in life sciences. Here’s just a sampling of what caught Bio-IT World’s eye and ear.

    Nov 18, 2011

  • Can Big Data Fix Healthcare?

    Forbes.com | "The era  of Big Data in healthcare has arrived," says GNS Healthcare CEO and co-founder Colin Hill in his debut "Healthcare 2020" blog.

    Nov 17, 2011

  • Perakslis, Mesirov and Leach Named Bio-IT World Expo 2012 Keynotes

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World has announced that Eric Perakslis (the newly appointed FDA CIO), Martin Leach (CIO, Broad Institute) and Jill Mesirov (chief informatics officer, Broad Institute) will be the featured keynote speakers at the 10th anniversary Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, which will be held in Boston on April 24-26, 2012.  

     

    Nov 17, 2011

  • PerkinElmer Targets Holistic Data Solutions

    Bio-IT World | With its recent acquisitions of CambridgeSoft and Geospiza to name but two, PerkinElmer is signaling a new strategy that highlights data analysis and software as much as its traditional strengths in hardware and chemical analysis. Spearheading the new strategy is Dan Marshak, an accomplished cell biologist who has served as PerkinElmer’s chief scientific officer for five years. Marshak sat down with Bio•IT World chief editor Kevin Davies to discuss PerkinElmer’s evolving strategy from both business and scientific perspectives. 

     

    Nov 16, 2011

  • The Utility of Cloud Computing

    Bio-IT World |In September 2011, we held our first standalone conference on the topic. Experts—users and vendors alike—gathered for two days of sharing insights and progress. The takeaway was that more and more users were comfortable with the flexibility, cost, and even security afforded by the cloud.

    Nov 15, 2011

  • Video: James Watson on Whole Genome Sequencing

    Bio-IT World | The complete video recording of the opening plenary session of last month's International Congress of Human Genetics, entitled “Whole Genome Sequencing: To do it or not to do it?”, featuring Nobel laureate Jim Watson and moderated by Bio-IT World's Kevin Davies, has just been posted. 

     

    Nov 14, 2011

  • BGI Releases Updated Bioinformatics Software and Datasets

    Bio-IT World | BGI used the opening of its annual international genomics conference, ICG-VI in Shenzhen, China, to announce the launch of new bioinformatics analysis software and pipelines, cloud-based solutions, and a new freely accessible database for large-scale data. 

    Nov 14, 2011

  • New Top500 List Expands Distance Between Top Supercomputers

    Top500 | Top500 released their most updated list at Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) today. The order of the top ten systems has not changed since June, but Japan's "K Computer", at the number one spot, completed a build out to make it four times as powerful as China's Tianhe-1A system in the number two position.

    Nov 14, 2011

  • Bill Gates on Pharma

    Forbes | Bill Gates may be an IT guru, but he also has a unique perspective on Big Pharma, thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Nov 10, 2011

  • High Performance Computing has Heterogeneous Future

    Bio-IT World | A new IDC report, sponsored by NVIDIA, takes a look at the upcoming era of exascale computing. To break the next speed barrier, IDC sees "heterogeneous computing" as the essential trend.   

     

    Nov 10, 2011

  • SNaPshot Test IDs Key Gene Mutations in Lung Cancer

    Guardian | Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a test called SNaPshot to identify identify mutations at more than 50 sites in 14 key genes in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), that is now being offered to patients with a range of other cancers.

    Nov 9, 2011

  • Biotech Stock Buyback Helps Raise Prices

    LA Times | Amgen spurs investors with a buyback program. The biotech planned to buy back $5 billion of its shares, about 10%, over the next month.  

    Nov 9, 2011

  • Hardware Appliances for Hadoop

    Wired | Recently, Dell, Oracle, and EMC have all unveiled what they bill as specialized hardware appliances for Hadoop, the open source software platform that analyzes data by splitting it up and distributing it across a cluster. Now NetApp has joined the fray with the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

    Nov 7, 2011

  • Japanese K Computer Passes 10 Petaflops

    HPC Wire | Fujitsu and RIKEN have announced that their "K computer" has passed the 10 petaflops mark. The system was partially completed when it topped the Top500 list in June with a Linpack result of 8.16 petaflops. The completed system has reportedly reached 10.51 petaflops on Linpack. 

    Nov 3, 2011

  • Genome Center for Gotham

    Bio-IT World |Prior to the formal announcement of NYGC on November 3 in Manhattan, Kelley gave her first in-depth interview with Bio•IT World editor Kevin Davies and talked about the extraordinary effort to bring a world-class genome center to the Big Apple, and what it means for the New York scientific and medical establishment.

    Nov 3, 2011

  • New York Genome Center Unveiled in Manhattan

    Bio-IT World | A remarkable public-private coalition of universities, medical centers, technology partners and philanthropists under the direction of Nancy Kelley has created the New York Genome Center (NYGC), which was officially unveiled in a ceremony in Manhattan this morning. NYGC is poised to have an immense impact on New York science, and will quickly become one of the largest genome centers in the U.S.

    Nov 2, 2011

  • Cornell Announces Red Cloud Computing Service

    Bio-IT World | Cornell University has announced an on-demand research computing service called Red Cloud available to researchers at Cornell and other academic institutions for a set subscription fee. 

    Nov 1, 2011

  • Japanese Genomics Organization Chooses New SGI HPC System

    Bio-IT World | The Institute for Chemical Research (ICR) at Kyoto University in Japan, has selected an SGI UV 1000 high performance computing and storage system to advance its genomics research and enable GenomeNet, a network of database and computational services for genome research and related research areas in biomedical sciences, operated by the Kyoto University Bioinformatics Center.

    Oct 31, 2011