• NHGRI Takes New, WGS Look at Mendelian Diseases

    Bio-IT World | The National Institutes of Health has made a five-year, nearly $80 million commitment to the establishment of a Mendelian Genomics Research Consortium of five clinical laboratories and one data coordinating center. The Consortium will build on previous National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) work to develop new methods for identifying the genetic causes of single-gene diseases.

    Jul 27, 2021

  • Sema4 Begins Trading, Eyes Healthcare Partnerships, Liquid Biopsy

    Bio-IT World | The board members of both Sema4 and CM Life Sciences voted this week to approve the special purpose acquisition company. The resulting combined company, Sema4 Holdings Corp, will commence trading of its shares of common stock and warrants on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbols "SMFR" and “SMFRW” today or Monday.

    Jul 23, 2021

  • DeepMind Releases Open Protein Structure Database Including Complete Human Proteome

    Bio-IT World | DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) today unveiled the most complete and accurate database of predicted protein structure models for the human proteome. The database includes about 350,000 protein structures and will be freely and openly available to the scientific community.

    Jul 22, 2021

  • PacBio Acquires Short-Read Sequencer Omniome for $800M

    Bio-IT World | Pacific Biosciences announced this morning that it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which it will acquire Omniome, a San Diego-based company developing a highly differentiated, proprietary short-read sequencing platform capable of delivering high accuracy.

    Jul 20, 2021

  • Pfizer’s Digital Strategy and Transformation

    Bio-IT World | Bill Leister, Pfizer’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Analytics and Data Platforms & Learning and Development, discusses the pandemic, platforms, and Pfizer’s digital vision.

    Jul 20, 2021

  • Why NLP Is the Key to Interpreting Unstructured Data in Pharma Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | Natural language processing can help the pharma industry assess the market potential of a new drug, as well as target patient populations more accurately for existing drugs. NLP is much faster than human processing and can standardize mass amounts of both qualitative and quantitative unstructured data quickly into usable information with actionable insights.

    Jul 19, 2021

  • Inflammatory Clock Measures ‘Universal’ Hallmark Of Aging

    Bio-IT World | Systemic chronic inflammation—a universally strong signal of ill health associated with all nine hallmarks of aging and diseases that collectively represent the leading causes of disability and mortality worldwide—can now be measured by an inflammatory clock of aging (iAge) developed by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. It is the first “actionable clock” that predicts multimorbidity, frailty, immunological health, and chronic diseases of aging.

    Jul 15, 2021

  • Strateos Makes Cloud Lab Software Available to In-House Labs

    Bio-IT World | Strateos has launched its SmartLab Software which enables research organizations of any size to manage scientific workflows in-house while integrating automation with a modular, cloud-based software platform.

    Jul 13, 2021

  • Strep A Vaccine Development No Longer ‘A Bridge Too Far’

    Bio-IT World | In at least two, placebo-controlled randomized trials getting underway in the next year, participants will be purposefully infected with a strain of group A streptococcus (Strep A) causing acute pharyngitis (strep throat) in a human challenge test of candidate vaccines intended to confer protection.

    Jul 8, 2021

  • Clonally-Derived Workflows: The Need For Wrap Around Data Packages For Regulatory Submissions

    Bio-IT World | As part of regulatory submissions commercial labs are required to demonstrate that their clonal-derivation process is sound and that the high-value master cell submitted, did indeed, start from a single cell. Process validation (is the process fit for purpose?) and subsequent verification (is the process still fit for purpose?) becomes the backbone of clonal assurance.

    Jul 7, 2021

  • Implantable Pharmacy-On-a-Chip Now Under Fasttrack Development

    Bio-IT World | A trio of universities are putting their heads together to engineer a wirelessly controlled bioelectronic implant intended to help soldiers adapt to new time zones or drastic changes in their work schedules by releasing peptide-based therapies to harmonize their central and peripheral circadian clocks.

    Jul 6, 2021

  • Follow the Money: AI-Powered Drug Discovery, Remote Access Labs

    Bio-IT World | Insilico Medicine closes a Series C for AI-powered drug discovery, while other investments fuel remote access labs, natural products, high throughput screening, and more.

    Jul 1, 2021

  • The Value Of Lab Data Automation To Facilitate Data-Centric Research

    Bio-IT World | In recent years, scientific research has moved from being process-driven to data-driven. Scientists are inferring the results of experiments by analyzing more data than ever, and it’s clear that companies that own the cleanest, best-annotated data will be the most successful in making ground-breaking discoveries within this paradigm. That said there are still significant challenges to data-driven research.

    Jun 30, 2021

  • Insilico Medicine Nets $225M, Pistoia Alliance Pushes Forward with FAIR, New Products

    Bio-IT World | Colorado researchers publish a new method to increase the utility and equity of large genetic databases, new collaboration for BC Platforms and CareDuchenne, Minnesota Supercomputing Institute joins iRODS, and what’s next for Biogen and Eisai. Plus new products from Benchling, Egnyte, Cytek, Waters, Bruker, and more.

    Jun 29, 2021

  • Data Privacy Is Key to Enabling the Medical Community to Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Its Full Potential

    Bio-IT World | If there’s anything the global pandemic has taught healthcare providers, it is the importance of timely and accurate data analysis and being ready to act on it. Yet these same organizations must move within the bounds of patient rights regulations, both existing and emerging, making it harder to access the data needed for building relevant artificial intelligence (AI) models. One way to get around this constraint is de-identify the data before curating it into one centralized location where it can be used for AI model training.

    Jun 24, 2021

  • Digital Patients Could Help More Drugs Reach Market

    Bio-IT World | Clinical trials employing digital representations of patients and running in parallel with actual clinical trials could soon help researchers understand what separates responders and nonresponders to a drug.

    Jun 22, 2021

  • H3’s Data Centric Approach to Cancer Genomics

    Bio-IT World | Lihua Yu took on the role of President of H3 three years ago; she oversees R&D and corporate development operations. She discusses her career trajectory and how the ideas and technologies fueling precision medicine have evolved since she joined H3.

    Jun 22, 2021

  • Snthesis Launches with Data Harmonization Lessons Learned From the Web

    Bio-IT World | As the life sciences industry seeks to manage—and fruitfully mine—more and more data, data harmonization is a bit of a nagging thorn. Snthesis launched this year, applying lessons learned from the Semantic Web to knowledge graphs for life sciences.

    Jun 17, 2021

  • Molecular Tweezers Found To Attack Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

    Bio-IT World | An international team of researchers has come up with a new application for “molecular tweezers” originally developed to untangle the amyloid nanofibers found in the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As it turns out, the tiny synthetic molecules may also be a way to prevent and treat bacterial infections like Staphylococcus aureus that have grown resistant to antibiotics

    Jun 16, 2021

  • Gamifying Vision: How Mobile Gaming Is Tracking Vision Degradation in Patients

    Bio-IT World | Tilak Healthcare aims to combine video games with medical expertise so that the same vision monitoring tools that are reliable and useful for doctors will be playful and fun for users. If Tilak can achieve that, the company tools will be “sticky” enough to have a longstanding impact on the healthcare process for patients.

    Jun 15, 2021