• Get SMRT: Pacific Biosciences Unveils Software Suite with Commercial Launch

    Bio-IT World | Pacific Biosciences marks the long-awaited commercial shipment of its single-molecule DNA sequencer this week with a package of custom software tools. The SMRT (single molecule/real time) Analysis software suite features web-based tools and algorithms for sequence alignment and de novo assembly, and even offers information on the kinetics of nucleotide incorporation. 

    Apr 29, 2011

  • Myriad Genetics Buys Rules-Based Medicine

    Statesman | Myriad Genetics has agreed to buy Rules-Based Medicine for $80 million in cash.

    Apr 28, 2011

  • Oxford Nanopore Raises Another $41 Million for GridION Platform

    Bio-IT World | Oxford Nanopore Technologies has raised a further £25 million ($41 million) in new private funding round that will support further development for the British firm's molecular sensing and next-generation sequencing technology. 

     

    Apr 26, 2011

  • PatientsLikeMe Study Shows Social Media's Value as Research Tool

    Wall Street Journal | A new clinical trial using social networking, conducted by researchers at Patients Like Me and published in Nature Biotechnology, shows the potential value of recruiting and analyzing data from volunteers in a virtual trial at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional trials, even as it refutes the claims of previously published trial on the effects of lithium in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease.  

    Apr 25, 2011

  • Meet Tanuki, a 10,000-core Supercomputer in the Cloud

    Bio-IT World | Connecticut-based Cycle Computing recently helped Genentech successfully spin up a 10,000-core supercomputer named Tanuki in the Amazon cloud, and CEO Jason Stowe sees no reason why he can't go further still.  

    Apr 25, 2011

  • Oracle Software Supporting Moffitt’s Personalized Medicine Ambitions

    Bio-IT World | Moffitt Cancer Center recently announced that it selected Oracle Health Sciences solutions as the foundation for its next-generation health and research informatics platform. The groundbreaking partnership will support efforts by Moffitt’s longitudinal research initiative Total Cancer Care (TCC) to supply doctors of the future with a bedside decision-making tool for better matching patients to trials and treatments, says Mark Hulse, R.N., vice president, information technology and chief information officer at Moffitt Cancer Center.

    Apr 20, 2011

  • Hey, Where Did the Cloud Go?

    The Atlantic Wire | An outage at Amazon's cloud-based EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Web hosting service, reportedly affecting servers in Virginia, took down a number of popular social media sites, including Foursquare, Reddit, and Hootsuite.  

    Apr 21, 2011

  • Genome Sequencing in Clinic Leads to Life-Saving Cancer Treatment

    AFP | In another example of sequencing in the clinic, researchers at Washington University's Genome Institute have used a patient's genome to inform clinical decisions about leukemia treatment.

    Apr 21, 2011

  • The Value of Outsourcing Bioinformatics

    Guest Commentary | With reducing R&D budgets, revenue streams under threat from expiring drug patents, and general loss of consumer confidence, every biotech organization is faced with making difficult decisions about the future structure and purpose of R&D teams. Outsourcing is vital to the ongoing ability of bioinformatics teams to effectively support R&D activities within their organizations.

    Apr 20, 2011

  • Blueprint Medicines Target Cancer with Genomics

    Technology Review | Blueprint Medicines, which announced $40 million in funding from Third Rock Ventures, is planning to develop drugs designed to target cancer cells with genomics.  

    Apr 19, 2011

  • Computerized Brain Model

    Wall Street Journal | Scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science unveiled a $55 million computerized atlas of the brain last week thanks to funding from Microsoft. The atlas has cataloged 1,000 anatomical landmarks in two normal adult brains.  

    Apr 18, 2011

  • VIDEO: The $1,000 Genome

    Bio-IT World Video | Bio-IT World Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Davies, spoke last month at Harvard Medical School on the $1,000 Genome and genetics in medicine.

    Apr 18, 2011

  • Decoding Tumors in Search of More Effective Cancer Treatments

    LA Times | "Every tumor is telling its own story, its own history," says Kevin White, director of the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago, which is leading one of numerous national and international cancer genome projects.

    Apr 18, 2011

  • Bio-IT World Announces 2011 Best Practices Winners

    Bio-IT World—Bio-IT World magazine announced the winners of its seventh Best Practices Awards program this morning at an awards ceremony following the opening keynote at the 2011 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.

    Apr 13, 2011

  • Third Rock Bets $40 Million On Blueprint Medicines

    Boston Globe | Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures is pumping $40 million into Blueprint Medicines, a new company founded by the discoverers of Gleevec that will develop targeted therapies for cancer.

    Apr 11, 2011

  • Biomatters Adds New Algorithms

    Bio-IT World | Biomatters' Geneious Server has added several new algorithms and improved capabilities to easily offload high-intensity processing to computer clusters straight from researchers’ desktops. Combined with the user-friendly Geneious Pro desktop software, researchers will have a wider choice of algorithms and direct access to the full power of their institution’s computing grid or cluster. 

    Apr 10, 2011

  • Making Medical Treatment Claims Patent-Eligible Subject Matter After Prometheus v. Mayo: A Prescription for Success

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | Recently, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reaffirmed its earlier ruling on patentability of medical treatment methods in Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services, after remand from the United States Supreme Court, post-Bilski, which held that a method of hedging in the energy commodities as an unpatentable abstract idea. So what is the prescription for making a medical treatment patent-eligible subject matter, and why should you be interested?

    Apr 7, 2011

  • Complete Genomics Makes 29 Genome Public

    By Bio IT World Staff April 7, 2011 | Complete Genomics announced yesterday that it has added 29 high coverage, complete human genome sequences to its public genomic repository. Combined with the 40 genome datasets that Complete Genomics released on

    Apr 6, 2011

  • The State of Mutation Curation

    Bio-IT World | It is a testament to David Cooper’s drive and perseverance that his Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD; www.hgmd.org) is the most comprehensive source of human mutation data currently available. “I hope it is a tremendous resource, because we’re not aware of any direct competitors,” says Cooper, a human molecular geneticist at Cardiff University’s Institute of Medical Genetics in Wales. 

    Apr 6, 2011

  • Wolfram Finds Few Answers Searching His Personal Genome

    Bio-IT World | As part of his long-standing interest in making the world’s knowledge computable, Stephen Wolfram is taking a long look at model genomes, not least his own. Last year, the British science prodigy, CEO of Wolfram Research, and developer of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, had his own genome sequenced by Illumina. Wolfram recently spoke to Bio-IT World and offered a preview of his keynote at Bio-IT World Expo on April 12.

    Apr 4, 2011