• Oak Ridge Researchers ID Proteins that Can Block Tumor Growth Pathway

    Bio-IT World | Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have definitively linked the function of a specific domain of proteins to the activation—and deactivation—of the c-MET pathway, which leads to the progression of tumor growth and metastatic cancer cells. Mutating any of four proteins blocks pathway progression.

    Jul 14, 2022

  • St. Jude Sickle Cell Research Team Warns Geneticists to Choose ‘the Right Mouse for the Job’

    Bio-IT World | Mitchell Weiss and fellow St. Jude team members devised autologous hematopoietic stem cell gene-editing techniques with hopes of curing sickle cell disease, but not without the “right mouse for the job.”

    Jul 12, 2022

  • For Drug Discovery Research, Laboratory Automation Needs to Be Flexible

    Bio-IT World | Scientists who want to implement automation in their laboratories should choose an infrastructure that can provide long-term flexibility for their teams. Increasing productivity with automation is essential to make that vision possible, and flexibility is critical for researchers to change workflows and take on new priorities quickly.

    Jul 8, 2022

  • Drug Repurposing Strategy Without An ‘Answer Book’

    Bio-IT World | Scientists working in the information biology lab at Hokkaido University in Japan have come up with a drug repurposing strategy combining machine learning, unsupervised clustering of gene expression, and two-stage prediction.

    Jul 7, 2022

  • Millimeter-Sized Feats Of Engineering Could Enable Smart Drug Delivery

    Bio-IT World | At Stanford University, precisely targeted drug delivery is in view using wireless micromachines that can navigate the rugged terrain of the human body, including the slippery surface of organs and vessels where blood flow may be impeded by hypertension and arterial plaques. The all-in-one amphibious robots’ locomotion is controlled by the strength and orientation of a three-dimensional magnetic field.

    Jul 5, 2022

  • Remote AI-Run Robotics Lab, Gut Microbiome as Targetable Biomarker, More

    Bio-IT World | A comprehensive ligand- and structure-based design platform delivers new and improved features for molecule design; an advanced automated GC headspace sampler and GC/mass spectrometry solution helps lab teams simplify operations; 10x Genomics releases a series of profiling products; and more.

    Jun 30, 2022

  • Follow the Money: Drug Discovery Robotics Lab, Clinical Sequencing Platform, More

    Bio-IT World | Funding for single-cell sequencing, small molecule drug discovery, neurological biomarkers, and more.

    Jun 29, 2022

  • Susan Gregurick Previews Potential Elements of NIH’s Next Strategic Plan for Data Science

    Bio-IT World | In the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science and Director of the Office of Data Science Strategy at the National Institutes of Health, gave a peek into what’s coming in the next iteration of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science.

    Jun 28, 2022

  • ‘Chemical Thermometer’ Factors In Local Environment Of A Cobalt Molecule

    Bio-IT World | A cobalt-based molecule engineered to be a noninvasive chemical thermometer for detecting tiny temperature changes, one of the signposts of injury and disease as well as the true edges of a cancerous tumor, opens the door to a new approach where the mimicking is focused on manipulating a molecule’s quantum aspects rather than its reactivity, according to Joseph Zadrozny, assistant professor of chemistry at Colorado State University.

    Jun 23, 2022

  • Ultrasound May Become Alternative To Antidiabetic Drugs

    Bio-IT World | Using ultrasound to stimulate neurometabolic pathways in the body to prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes is a centerpiece of research and development efforts at the General Electric (GE) Research Center in Niskayuna, NY.

    Jun 22, 2022

  • Organ-On-A-Chip Platform For Studying Immune Response To Vaccines

    Bio-IT World | A first in the world of organs-on-a-chip, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have come up with a lymphoid follicle (LF) model that can be used to probe the function of the immune system and predict its response to vaccines—including the three (Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J) currently in use for the prevention of COVID-19. “We hit upon the recipe that works and, in retrospect, it makes sense given what happens naturally,” says senior staff scientist Girija Goyal, Ph.D.

    Jun 21, 2022

  • Improving Data Standardization in Neuroscience Research

    Bio-IT World | Recent advances in the commercialization of neuroscience data acquisition technology have enabled a quickly growing collection of massive brain activity and behavioral datasets. Within the data lie exciting promises of solving how the brain generates behavior, and how it might be better healed when diseased or disturbed. But interpreting these large, high-dimensional datasets isn’t easy. We need modern, collaborative solutions that help scale data management, analysis, and knowledge sharing.

    Jun 17, 2022

  • Moving Data for Clinical Trials: Standards, Systems to Link EHRs with EDC

    Bio-IT World | “Thirty to 40% of clinical trial costs are associated with actually just the manual retyping of [EHR] data [into the clinical trial system], and it leads to reporting delays and a number of other inefficiencies,” Adam Asare, chief data officer at the Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative/UCSF, told the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo audience last month. Asare shared a solution to that problem: a collaboration with OpenClinica that won the team a Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award.

    Jun 16, 2022

  • Tag Technology Helps Drugmakers Assess If ‘The Juice Is Worth The Squeeze’

    Bio-IT World | While the field of targeted protein degradation (TPD) continues its rapid expansion, with multiple TPD drugs now in clinical trials, researchers in Australia are jumping in at an earlier stage with “tag technology” to ensure the disease protein is worth designing a drug against in the first place. Their work—an extension of other tag-targeting protein degradation technologies—gives researchers the wherewithal to ask if, “the juice is worth the squeeze,” according to Rebecca Feltham, Ph.D., laboratory head in the Ubiquitin Signalling Division of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

    Jun 15, 2022

  • ‘Federated Analysis’ Helps Fill Genetic Risk Knowledge Gap On BRCA Genes

    Bio-IT World | A significantly heightened risk of breast cancer has two well-known culprits—mutations to the tumor suppressor genes BRCA1 and BRCA2—but more than 40% of the time they are black-box “variants of uncertain significance.” Using a new data-sharing innovation known as federated analysis, however, an international team of researchers has categorized 16 of these uncertain variants as benign or likely benign so their carriers may be able to have their clinical risk of disease managed properly and avoid the risk of invasive and irrevocable surgeries.

    Jun 14, 2022

  • Biotech Industry Leaders Give Advice to Earlier-Career Scientists

    Bio-IT World | Over the past two years, Stan Gloss, founding partner at BioTeam, has been sitting down with leaders in pharma and biotech for our Trends from the Trenches column and—more recently—the Trends from the Trenches podcast. They have been wide-ranging conversations covering everything from digital transformation at big pharma to All of Us and population genomics, data-driven cancer genomics to AI/ML models in drug discovery.

    Jun 9, 2022

  • Genetic Control Of Autoimmune Disease Mapped To Cellular Level

    Bio-IT World | The pioneering OneK1K study in Australia has identified an immune “fingerprint” of seven autoimmune disorders using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). The general framework, which combines the scRNA-seq data with genotype data to classify individual cells, can be applied to many different diseases.

    Jun 8, 2022

  • Building a Tech-Enabled Drug Discovery Pipeline at AstraZeneca

    Bio-IT World | Innovative Practices Award | AstraZeneca is using technology to speed and improve drug discovery at every step of the process, explained Anna Berg Asberg, global VP of R&D IT, last month in her presentation at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo outlining AstraZeneca’s Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award-winning project.

    Jun 7, 2022

  • The Role of AI in Precision Health Explored at Bio-IT World Conference

    Bio-IT World | At the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo last month, several sessions explored ways AI is transforming oncology diagnosis, research, and care delivery. Speakers from the National Cancer Institute, Tempus Labs, The Ohio State University, IQVIA, Pangaea Data, University of Illinois Cancer Center, Stable Solutions and more discussed how far we’ve come, and where our next challenges lie.

    Jun 7, 2022

  • Guardant and IQVIA Develop Precision Oncology Platform to Normalize Clinical Data

    Bio-IT World | Innovative Practices Award | Extracting high-quality data from clinical records can be time-consuming and costly, primarily when manual abstractors are tasked with mining complex, unstructured, and lengthy documents. That’s why the scientists at Guardant Health and Linguamatics, an IQVIA company, launched a real-world evidence database called GuardantINFORM. The platform was named one of the 2022 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices award winners.

    Jun 2, 2022