• 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librarian is the soft-spoken, bespectacled woman politely shushing you when you’re talking in the library, that outdated perception couldn’t be further from the truth.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

  • Big Data, BGI and GigaScience

    Bio-IT World | Does the world really need yet another journal? The Chinese founders of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) clearly think so. This fall they will publish GigaScience, an open-access peer-reviewed journal dedicated to large-scale data. Laurie Goodman, an American science editor and writer, will spearhead the launch. Goodman’s former colleague, Kevin Davies, asked her about the journal’s goals and features. 

    Sep 23, 2011

  • Amazon Announces New AWS Resources

    AWS Blog | Amazon Web Services announced yesterday that they have made new resources available to the scientific research community. 

    Sep 22, 2011

  • PacBio Cuts 28% of Workforce

    Xconomy | PacBio cut 28% of its workforce--130 employees--according to a report released yesterday to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

    Sep 20, 2011

  • CAGI Challenge Gauges Computational Predictions of Phenotype

    Bio-IT World | A host of deadlines are approaching for the CAGI challenges, starting September 30 and running through the end of the year. The Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation project is a community experiment to objectively assess computational methods for predicting the phenotypic impacts of genomic variation. 

    Sep 19, 2011

  • Patent Reform's 'Brave New World'

    Bio-IT World | Expert Commentary | On Friday—after several years of seemingly dead-end discussions about reforming the patent system in the U.S.—President Obama signed the America Invents Law. The law generally is considered the most significant reform in U.S. patent law in the last 60 years, although many parties do not think it goes far enough.   

     

    Sep 18, 2011

  • Genzyme Veteran Gives $10m to Open Personalized Medicine Center at Mass General

    Boston Globe | Retired biotech executive Henri Termeer, who built Genzyme Corp, is donating $10 million to Massachusetts General Hospital to establish it as a leader in personalized medicne.

    Sep 15, 2011

  • BGI, Merck Announce Biomarker Collaboration

    Bio-IT World | Merck and BGI today announced a collaboration to focus on the discovery and development of biomarkers and genomic technologies, an extension of last year’s statement of intent to build a working relationship.

    Sep 13, 2011

  • Korean Genome Project Finds Korea-Only SNPs

    Bio-IT World | Yesterday, the Korean Personal Genome Project announced the release of 20 full Korean genomes, the KPGP-20. The genomes revealed 60,000 SNPs that seem unique to Koreans. 

    Sep 13, 2011

  • Cliff Reid on Advice and Honesty

    San Francisco Business Times | Cliff Reid, president and CEO of Complete Genomics, talks about his mentor's best advice and his comittment to honesty.

    Sep 12, 2011

  • Niederhuber on Inova/Complete Genomics Partnership and ‘Next-Gen Medicine’

    Bio-IT World | John Niederhuber, CEO of the Inova Translational Medicine Institute, discusses the multi-million-dollar deal with Complete Genomics to sequence the 1,500 genomes including 250 pre-term babies, the challenges of interpreting the data, and the future of what he calls 'next-gen medicine.'

    Sep 9, 2011