• 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

  • Ion Torrent’s $3-Million Community Incentive Plan

    Bio-IT World | Ion Torrent, the next-generation sequencing company founded by Jonathan Rothberg that was recently acquired by Life Technologies, is offering three $1-million prizes to any researcher(s) or programmer(s) that come up with major enhancements in the speed, quantity and accuracy of the company’s newly released Personal Genome Machine (PGM).  

    Dec 14, 2010

  • Deadly Trials

    Vanity Fair | As more clinical trials move overseas, are the results of those trials applicable to Americans? Are they safe? Vanity Fair argues that overseas trials are beyond the reach of FDA and are conducted where "regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves."

    Dec 12, 2010

  • Panasonic, imec Announce Lab-on-Chip for SNP Detection

    Bio-IT World | Panasonic and imec have announced components of a lab-on-a-chip sensor enabling SNP detection. The technology was presented this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco and included  various a miniaturized pump for on-chip generation of high pressures, a micropillar filter optimized for DNA separation achieving world-record resolution, and a SNP detector allowing on-chip detection using very small sample volumes.

    Dec 10, 2010

  • Break Out: Pacific Biosciences Team Identifies Asian Origin for Haitian Cholera Bug

    Bio-IT World | In a dramatic piece of genetic detective work, Pacific Biosciences and Harvard Medical School researchers have decoded the sequence of the strain of bacteria responsible for the deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti. The findings, which confirm the putative Asian origin for the devastating outbreak, are published online in the New England Journal of Medicine today. 

    Dec 9, 2010

  • Complete Genomics Adds CNV Analysis to Cancer Sequencing

    Xconomy | Complete Genomics is amping up its efforts to sequence cancer genomes. As an addition to its $10,000 sequencing service, the company plans to run basic computational analysis for all the copy number variations, and structural variations in tumors at no extra cost.

    Dec 8, 2010

  • Broad Updates Molecular Signatures Database

    Bio-IT World | Researchers at the Broad Institute have released MSigDB 3.0, the most comprehensive molecular signatures database to date. MSigDB is a database of annotated gene sets that has become a standard tool for gaining insights from the results of genomic studies.

    Dec 7, 2010

  • Pfizer CEO Kindler Retires

    Reuters | Pfizer CEO, Jeffrey Kindler, retired unexpectedly the company announced late on Sunday. He is being replaced by the gobal head of pharmaceuticals, Ian Read.

    Dec 5, 2010

  • Nanopore Sequencing Takes More Small Steps

    Bio-IT World | New research from Mark Akeson and colleagues at UCSC shows that the decade long goal of sequencing DNA by passing an intact single strand of DNA through a protein nanopore is edging closer to reality. 

    Dec 2, 2010

  • Phylogenetics for Facebook?

    Bio-IT World | A pattern-matching puzzle created by bioinformaticians at McGill University lets players sort genetic code. The game, called Phylo, takes advantage of the human brain's efficiency at recognizing and sorting patterns to tackle multiple sequence alignments.

    Dec 1, 2010

  • Survey Says Drug Makers Still Frustrated

    San Diego Union Tribune | Life science companies are irked by the FDA's lengthy drug review process, increasing fees, and issues raised late in the process according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey released yesterday.

    Nov 30, 2010

  • LIMS Made Freely Available to DNA Barcoding Community

    Bio-IT World | SINGAPORE—The Moorea Biocode Project, a species inventory of the island of Moorea, is making publicly available its LIMS as a free beta version. The Moorea Biocode Project aims to create a comprehensive inventory of all of the coral reef and terrestrial species on Moorea larger than a microbe. The Biocode LIMS and data analysis components of the project were developed by Biomatters in collaboration with the Biocode Project researchers as a plugin for Biomatters’ Geneious Pro sequence analysis software.

    Nov 29, 2010

  • Chasing Exascale

    PC World | There's an international race to build an exascale computer--a project that is estimated to cost billions of dollars. At the Department of Energy, Peter Beckman is leading the effort.

    Nov 28, 2010

  • Melanoma Methods of Resistance

    Nature News | Two studies published in Nature reveal why promising melanoma drug PLX4032 fails in some patients and how tumors' resistance to the drug may be overcome.

    Nov 24, 2010

  • Microsoft Cofounder Invests $9.4 Million in Biotech, Neuroscience

    Boston Globe | Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, is funding biotech with $9.4 million in grants. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has awarded seven three-year grants to Allen Distinguished Investigators, in what could become an ongoing program. The grants are focused on biotech and basic neuroscience and are meant for cutting-edge research projects.

    Nov 22, 2010

  • IBM Takes Top Green Honors at SC2010

    PC World | China may have taken top honors in the most recent Top500 listing, but IBM walked away with another award: the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.

    Nov 21, 2010

  • Ignite Institute Moves to Philadelphia

    Washington Business Journal | The Ignite Institute, originally planned for Northern Virginia, appears to be headed instead to Philadelphia and the Fox Chase Cancer Center.

    Nov 17, 2010