• Layoffs Looming as Illumina Restructures

    Sign On San Diego |  Amid news that Illumina plans to restructure its business because of slowing sales, setting the stage for layoffs at the leading NGS instrument maker in the wake of disappointing sales figures, the company has also revealed plans to create a new unit devoted to forging business with hospitals and physicians. “We really need to create a much stronger focus on customers that are using our technologies in clinical applications,” said CEO Jay Flatley. 

     

    Oct 26, 2011

  • Pistoia Alliance Announces NGS Data Compression Algorithm Competition

    Bio-IT World | The Pistoia Alliance of more than 50 life science companies, vendors, publishers, and academic groups, has launched a competition to find the best algorithm for compressing next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, with a $15,000 first prize. 

    Oct 25, 2011

  • Genia’s Nanopore/Microchip Technology Gains Life Technologies’ Support

    Bio-IT World EXCLUSIVE | From a chance meeting in a Silicon Valley Starbucks, Genia is the latest start-up vying to make an impact in the increasingly crowded field of nanopore sequencing, featuring a novel microchip platform that has already caught the attention of one of the giants in next-generation sequencing.

    Oct 21, 2011

  • Cycle Computing Offers $10,000 Cloud Prize in BigScience Challenge

    Bio-IT World | Building on some positive industry and media response earlier this year to its success in spinning up a 30,000-core supercomputer in the Amazon Cloud, Cycle Computing is planning to offer $10,000 prize in computing time “to help researchers answer questions that will help humanity.”

    Oct 20, 2011

  • Recent Sequencing Plans by the Numbers

    Xconomy | What do 10,000 people with autism, 50,000 people in some remote islands in the North Atlantic, and 1,000 healthy old folks in southern California have in common?

    Oct 18, 2011

  • A QuantuMDx Leap for Handheld DNA Sequencing

    Bio-IT World |  Capping off an exciting International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal, clinical geneticist Sir John Burn provided the first glimpse at a disruptive nanowire technology for rapid DNA genotyping, produced by UK company QuantuMDx, that could eventually mature into the world’s first handheld DNA sequencer. 

     

    Oct 16, 2011

  • DNAnexus to Host Short Read Archive (SRA) Database in Google Cloud

    Bio-IT World | DNAnexus says it will offer free, improved access to the Short Read Archive (SRA), the funding-challenged trove of NGS read data hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in a new partnership with Google Cloud Storage. 

    Oct 12, 2011

  • Illumina Launches BaseSpace Cloud Platform for MiSeq

    Bio-IT World | Illumina’s much anticipated MiSeq instrument for next-gen sequencing enters full production with a series of enhancements including streamlined sample processing and a new Cloud platform called BaseSpace to faciliate data management and collaboration.  

    Oct 12, 2011

  • Accelrys Launches Next-Generation Informatics Suite and Cloud Portal

    Bio-IT World | Accelrys is releasing its "next-generation informatics suite" this week, including a chemical registration system and a Cloud-based portal called HEOS in partnership with SCYNEXIS, in what one company executive calls the first coherent suite to span scientists' daily workflows since the 2010 merger with Symyx.  

     

    Oct 12, 2011

  • Best Practices 2012: Call for Entries

    Bio-IT World | The 2012 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition has released its call for entries. Since 2003, Bio-IT World's Best Practices competition has been recognizing outstanding examples of technology and strategic innovation initiatives across the drug discovery enterprise. The deadline for entry is January 13, 2012, and the early bird deadline is December 16, 2011.  

     

    Oct 8, 2011

  • Eric Perakslis Appointed New CIO of FDA

    Bio-IT World | Eric Perakslis, formerly Chief Information Officer (CIO) of R&D Information Technology at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D, has joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as the FDA’s new Chief Information Officer and Chief Scientist (Informatics).    

    Oct 10, 2011

  • VCs Pull Back on Biotech Investments and Its FDA's Fault

    Wall Street Journal | Venture capitalists look to be steering their money away from biotech, a development that life science investors fear will push jobs and treatment overseas. The main reason for the shift? A Food and Drug Administration the investors says is dysfunctional, unpredictable, and risk-averse.

    Oct 6, 2011

  • Powering Preventative Medicine

    Bio-IT World  | DNA Electronics certainly sounds like the quintessential bio-IT company, but this London firm is quietly making waves in the field of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and molecular diagnostics. Some of the firm’s key intellectual property (IP) is providing the foundation for present and future semiconductor sequencing platforms. And some of that same technology lies at the core of the firm’s newly developed handheld device, dubbed the SNP-DR, which can detect dozens of DNA variants in a saliva sample within 20-30 minutes.  

     

    Oct 6, 2011

  • Big Pharma's Last Refuge

    Bio-IT World | In the previous issue of Bio•IT World, my fellow columnist Ernie Bush posed the question, what are the limits to collaboration among pharmaceutical companies? This same question was faced by the telecommunications industry in 1913, albeit during an era of ascendancy and not senescence. This led to a solution that lasted 70 years. Could history repeat itself?

    Oct 4, 2011

  • Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian in Pharma R&D

    Bio-IT World | If your image of a research librarian is the soft-spoken, bespectacled woman politely shushing you when you’re talking in the library, that outdated perception couldn’t be further from the truth. Research librarians are highly skilled data analysts and business experts playing key roles in driving company performance, particularly in life sciences organizations. They ensure the most talented project teams make the right choices, perform at their highest levels, and reach outcomes their companies are striving for.  

     

    Oct 3, 2011

  • Galaxy's Open Source Support for NGS Exploration

    Bio-IT World | Enter the term “galaxy” in a Web search engine, Penn State’s Anton Nekrutenko muses, and the top hits are likely to be an astrophysical entity or “a very bad soccer team.” But making fast strides up the web charts is the Galaxy open-source tool, which is coming into its own as more and more researchers seek ways to easily handle and manipulate next-gen sequencing (NGS) and other large datasets.

    Sep 30, 2011

  • New iReport Product Quickly Processes 'Omics Data

    Bio-IT World | Ingenuity Systems has just announced its iReport product for quickly making sense of 'omics data and will offer free, early access to the first 5,000 researchers to sign up by October 31.

    Sep 28, 2011

  • GenePattern Announces Module Archive for Bioinformatics Community

    Bio-IT World | The creators of GenePattern, winner of a Bio-IT World Best Practices Award in 2005, have just launched GParc, the GenePattern Archive, as a place to share modules and help grow the GenePattern community.

    Sep 27, 2011

  • Savoring an NGS Software Smorgasbord

    Bio-IT World | ‘Scaling to bigger and better hardware doesn’t help if your data is [sic] growing in size faster than your hardware,” says Titus Brown at Michigan State University. He and others in the NGS community are calling for software solutions to their NGS data woes instead of massive storage options. In an August post on his blog, “Daily Life in an Ivory Basement,” Brown wrote: “The bottom line is this: when your data cost is decreasing faster than your hardware cost, the long-term solution cannot be to buy, rent, borrow, beg, or steal more hardware. The solution must lie in software and algorithms.”  

     

    Sep 27, 2011

  • VC Investments in Biotech Collapse, Threaten Health Care

    The Atlantic | Medical device, biotech and diagnostic companies account for about a third of all angel and venture capital investments. But today, this system is in collapse, jeopardizing the very foundation of what has made the U.S. health care system the envy of the modern world.

    Sep 25, 2011