• Portal Partnering: Connecting Pharma and CROs

    Comment | The contract research market grew 13% in 2009, reaching $23.5 billion, according to the Contract Research Annual Review 2010 report. But as these partnerships with contract research organizations become more common, it will become essential for firms to establish collaborative communications with their partners. A partner portal, connecting the sponsor with the CRO, is an effective platform to achieve these goals.

    Jan 10, 2011

  • Biogen Fills Head R&D Position

    Boston Globe | Biogen Idec has filled its head of research and operations position, a job that has been empty since October 2009.

    Jan 6, 2011

  • GenomeQuest and Ingenuity Announce NGS Partnership

    Bio-IT World | GenomeQuest and Ingenuity Systems have announced a partnership to support next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows specifically targeted for personalized medicine research. The companies will integrate GenomeQuest’s Sequence Data Management (SDM) platform with Ingenuity’s IPA software enabling researchers to exchange gene information, perform interactive analysis, and create and test hypotheses across the domains of genome sequencing and biological pathways.

    Jan 5, 2011

  • Jackson Labs Pulls Bid For Florida Expansion

    Tampa Tribune | The Jackson Laboratories has pulled an application to the state of Florida for $50 million for a planned personalized medicine institute with the University of South Florida, although the institute insists it remains "very enthusiastic about our possible Florida expansion."

    Jan 5, 2011

  • Pfizer Extends RNA Drug Deal

    Bloomberg | Pfizer is expanding Wyeth's 2009 RNA-focused partnershp with Santaris Pharma in a deal that could be worth more than $600 million.

    Jan 4, 2011

  • At Novartis, Fishman Finds a Winning Formula

    Boston Globe | Nine years after his appointment as president of the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, cardiologist Mark Fishman, 58, is overseeing an expansion of Novartis research in the U.S. and around the world. 

    Jan 4, 2011

  • J&J and MGH Go After the Cancer Blood Test

    CNN | Johnson and Johnson and Massachusetts General Hospital are developing and marketing a blood test that could find a single cancer cell in a person's blood.

    Jan 3, 2011

  • New Drug Approvals Slipped in 2010

    Wall Street Journal | The FDA approved about 21 drugs in 2010, a relatively modest figure that shows the pharmaceutical industry hasn't yet escaped its drought in recent years. The 2010 figures were lower than the 25 drugs approved in 2009 or 24 in 2008, but higher than the low of 18 in 2007. 

    Jan 3, 2011

  • Rothberg's Personal Genome Machine

    Forbes | Jonathan Rothberg's new Personal Genome Machine (PGM) has an 8-inch touchscreen and a dock to link to an iPhone. It's the smallest and cheapest DNA decoder on the market.

    Dec 29, 2010

  • Abuse Possibilities for Genetic Data

    Forbes | There's no federal law against surreptitious DNA testing, and in 2009 New Scientist writer Michael Reilly sucessfully collected a colleague's DNA (from a water glass), had it amplified and sent it to a genetic testing company.

    Dec 29, 2010

  • The Surprising Genetics of Hair Loss

    New York Times | Angela Christiano announced the genetics of alopecia areata, a hair loss disease, last summer. Previously thought to be linked to autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, it turned out to be more closely related to rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and celiac disease.

    Dec 28, 2010

  • Genome Dark Matter

    Wired | Studies published in Nature and Science have begun to shed light on the "activities of the cell," says Peter Park.

    Dec 26, 2010

  • Distributed Bio’s Chris Smith on the Rise of iRODS

    Bio-IT World | Chris Smith, co-founder with ex-Pfizer informatician Giles Day of a new bio-IT consultancy called Distributed Bio, talks about the firm's value proposition, the cloud, and the growing interest in next-gen circles in an open-source data management tool called iRODS. 

    Dec 23, 2010

  • Wisconsin Team Makes Definitive Diagnosis Using 454 Sequencing

    Journal Sentinel Online | Using 454 sequencing, doctors at the Medical College in Wisconsin have published the results of successful exome sequencing in a seriously ill boy with undiagnosed bowel disease. The study revealed mutations in a gene called XIAP, which had not been included among more than 2,000 likely candidate genes before the sequencing was performed. 

    Dec 20, 2010

  • Avila Signs Covalent Drug Pact with Sanofi-Aventis

    Bio-IT World | Avila Therapeutics, the Waltham, MA-based drug discovery company commercializing covalently bound small molecule compounds, has announced a significant strategic alliance with Sanofi-Aventis for the development of cancer drugs. 

    Dec 20, 2010

  • Final Four Weeks for 2011 Best Practices Awards Entries

    Bio-IT World | It’s down to the final four weeks for entries in the 2011 Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards.   

    Dec 20, 2010

  • SNAP Comes Up Trumps at Inaugural CAGI Competition

    Nature.com | Rutgers University bioinformatician Yana Bromberg's SNAP program won top honors at the inaugural Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI) competition, convened last week by University of California Berkeley's Steven Brenner.

    Dec 17, 2010

  • 23andMe Scores NIH Funding for Pharmacogenetics Research

    Fast Company | Consumer genomics company 23andMe has received a $190,000 grant to study "web-based phenotyping for genome-wide association studies of drug response" from the NIH.

    Dec 17, 2010

  • Meet the Genome Bloggers

    Nature News | Set your genome free on the internet, and it might come back to you with some surprising interpretations. Projects such as the Dodecad Ancestry Project and the Eurogenes Ancestry Project are analyzing personal ancestry and human population history and reporting the findings online.

    Dec 15, 2010

  • HHMI Launches International Early Career Scientist Competition

    HHMI | The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has launched an international competition to select up to 35 early career scientists working at academic institutions in 18 countries on five continents with the goal of helping these talented individuals establish independent research programs.

    Dec 14, 2010