• 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

  • Microsoft’s Azure Cloud BLASTs a Challenge to Amazon

    Bio-IT World | Backing up the claim that cloud computing is its top strategic priority, Microsoft marked the beginning of this year’s Supercomuting conference (SC10) that by porting the sequence aligner BLAST to Windows Azure, it is releasing a major protein dataset that should not only be of value to researchers in its own right but also demonstrate the potential value of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud to the bioscience community.

    Nov 16, 2010

  • Hollywood Biology

    New York Times | Dr. Robert Lue of Harvard is animating the cell. A pioneer in molecular animation, Lue and others are applying computer-based animation from the film industry to biology.

    Nov 16, 2010

  • A Turnaround for Toxicogenomics?

    Bio-IT World | With a 90% drug attrition rate in clinical trials due primarily to the high incidence of adverse effects, there is a huge financial incentive for drug companies to develop methods that will quickly eliminate toxic compounds from the drug pipelines.

    Nov 15, 2010

  • Chinese Supercomputer Ranked Top in the World by Top500

    InformationWeek | China bests the US in the most recent Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. China's Tianhe-1A system in Tianjin achieved 2.57 petaflops per second to earn first place.

    Nov 15, 2010