September News and Product Briefs
News Briefs
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, a digital-health subsidiary of BioTime, announced initial results and new clinical features for their free Asthma Health app. Released six months ago, the app enables individuals with asthma to participate in a large-scale medical research study through their Apple iPhones. The app’s newest features — a “Doctor Dashboard” and integration with the Epic electronic health record system — will help Asthma Health study participants to use the app with their physicians. (For more on the asthma-focused partnership, see “LifeMap Solutions Teams Up with Mount Sinai on Digital Health.”) Press release
Panasas released a customer case study on the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. One of the first facilities to deploy the Illumina HiSeq X Ten sequencing platform, a system that produces up to 5 TB of data per day, Garvan is using five Panasas ActiveStor appliances with a storage capacity of 400 TB. To run the Illumina system at full capacity, Garvan implemented parallel storage with the Panasas PanFS parallel file system, allowing the institute to sequence an average of 50 genomes per day. Press release
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Princeton University have designed a new online tool that predicts the role of proteins and genes in diseases of the human immune system. Details of the publically available resource, “ImmuNet,” were published online in the journal Immunity. ImmuNet uses information compiled from 38,088 public experiments to predict new immune pathway interactions, mechanisms, and disease-associated genes. Press release
The Genomics Platform of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has been named a site for one of two Genome Characterization Centers (GCCs) in the United States. The Broad Institute and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston will become the flagship data-production centers for a five-year project supported by the National Cancer Institute to characterize the genomic changes found in tumors. As a GCC, the Broad Institute will produce genomic data for NCI projects including the Exceptional Responders Initiative, the ALCHEMIST Project (Adjuvant Lung Cancer Enrichment Marker Identification and Sequencing Trials), and the Cancer Driver Discovery Project. Press release
Tute Genomics entered a commercial partnership with Genatak, a large center for genomic medicine in the Middle East. Genatak recently deployed Tute Genomics’ cloud-based platform to advance and scale the center’s genetic diagnostic service, and now plans to make the platform available directly to other clinical laboratories and hospitals throughout the Middle East. Press release
SCIEX announced a collaboration with the laboratory of Amanda Paulovich at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to make targeted proteomics in cancer research more reproducible and specific. The collaboration provides SCIEX rights to commercialize the immuno-MRM assays that have been developed in the Paulovich Laboratory, as part of an NIH-funded project to create assays that quantitatively measure phosphorylated and unmodified proteins known to be involved in cancer signaling pathways. Immuno-MRM kits will be commercialized for SCIEX’s targeted proteomics workflow, including sample preparation reagents, antibodies and beads for target enrichment, internal standards for quantification, and related methods for LC-MS and data analysis. Press release
Janssen, in collaboration with the Ontario Government, University of Toronto, and MaRS Discovery District, will open a JLABS incubator in Toronto. The new facility will open in spring of 2016 at MaRS Discovery District and will support start-ups with lab space, programs, and potential investment partners. As the first JLABS to open outside the United States, JLABS @ Toronto joins a network of life science facilities in San Diego, San Francisco, South San Francisco, Boston, and Houston. These facilities are home to over 100 early-stage companies advancing bio/pharmaceutical, medical device, consumer and digital health programs. Press release
The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, announced that its 2015 tranSMART Annual Meeting will be held October 19-21, 2015 at the National Cancer Institute of the Netherlands in Amsterdam. The conference will include keynote presentations, training sessions, and a Hackathon. There will also be a summary of the Foundation's first Datathon that was held this summer on Cross Neurodegenerative Diseases. Meeting page
New Products
GENALICE announced the global launch date of Population Calling, a new analysis module and part of the GENALICE MAP Next-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis Suite. In a webinar event on October 8, the company will reveal a new NGS data analysis methodology in which multiple samples from a cohort study are examined in a single variant detection analysis, designed to scale to thousands of patient samples. Press release
Riffyn announced the upcoming beta launch of its experimental design software for quality and collaboration in life science, chemical and materials R&D. Riffyn’s cloud-based software includes visual design of experiments, real-time data integration, 24/7 analytics and peer-to-peer sharing. Access to Riffyn will be free for both academic and industrial researchers. Press release