• Superbugs and the Flawed Antibiotic Development Model, Alert to a Growing Global Health Risk

    Bio-IT World | After over a year of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s hard to picture another global health crisis emerging, but data indicates bacterial infections could cause the next pandemic, as several known “superbugs” have adapted to resist all available antibiotics. The effects could be highly detrimental if today’s antibiotic development model doesn’t evolve and take priority. Antibiotics typically take an average of 10-15 years to develop and at high costs, roughly 1-2 billion dollars. This is due in part to the long, risky drug development process that has become the standard.

    Aug 27, 2021

  • Discovery on Target: A Deeper Look at 3D Cellular Models

    Bio-IT World | “This field is developing so rapidly. If it has been six months…, you're behind.” That’s how Christopher Austin describes the 3D cellular models research landscape. As the past director for NCATS, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Chris knows the pace of this research area well. He recently left NCATS to serve as one of Flagship Pioneering’s CEO-Partners.

    Aug 26, 2021

  • Biochip Platform Could Enable Personalized Immunotherapy

    Bio-IT World | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and South Korean biotech Medical & Bio Decision Company Ltd. (MBD) are working on turning a biochip into a personalized immunotherapy platform for rapidly screening a wide range of treatment cocktails for individual cancer patients. The platform would be ideally suited for very small tumor biopsy samples.

    Aug 25, 2021

  • NIH Awards $53M for HIV Cure Research for Adults, Children

    Bio-IT World | The National Institutes of Health has awarded approximately $53 million in annual funding over the next five years to 10 research organizations in a continued effort to find a cure for HIV.

    Aug 23, 2021

  • Three Reasons Biopharma Companies Can’t Afford To Miss The Digital Revolution

    Bio-IT World | In the biopharmaceutical industry, there’s no shortage of data—the issue organizations more often face is how to capture data in ways that derive insight from it. Rather than stitching together a patchwork of data from disparate systems after the fact, more emphasis should be placed on capturing data in context, right at the point of execution.

    Aug 20, 2021

  • Ovarian Cancer Chip Model Reveals Drug Repurposing Opportunities

    Bio-IT World | A novel organ-on-a-chip model of ovarian cancer has been used to showcase the sinister activities of tumors, including use of circulating platelets to fuel their growth and undermine treatment with chemotherapeutic drugs. The model also demonstrated the potential of an anti-platelet drug, currently in clinical trials for a different condition: to fight back.

    Aug 17, 2021

  • Unchanging Rules Of Gene Expression Could Improve Drug Approval Odds

    Bio-IT World | Network theory holds that everything is connected—including if the “nodes” are human cells, genomes, proteomes, or transcriptomes. It is “pure, algorithm-run precision math,” and it could be an entirely new approach to big data science that could erase the declining odds that a drug entering clinical studies will exit a winner.

    Aug 13, 2021

  • Spanish Team Builds Neural Network to Predict Small Molecule Characteristics

    Bio-IT World | A team of researchers in Barcelona have gathered bioactivity information for a million molecules using deep machine-learning computational models and a database of experimental results. Both the experimental results and the machine learning tool are available to the community at bioactivitysignatures.org.

    Aug 11, 2021

  • AI in Healthcare: Lessons Learned From Moffitt Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic

    Bio-IT World | Until recently, Ross Mitchell served as the inaugural AI Officer at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Now he’s offering consulting expertise borne of a long career applying AI to healthcare and health systems.

    Aug 10, 2021

  • Follow the Money: RNA Therapeutics, AI-Driven Therapy Design

    Bio-IT World | Deep Genomics nets cash for AI-designed RNA therapeutics, Strata advances personalized minimal residual disease (MRD) assays, Frontier Medicines goes after the proteome, and more.

    Aug 5, 2021

  • #BioIT21: Insider’s Guide to Making the Most of the Hybrid Program

    Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference and Expo will be happening both in-person and online this year—giving our community even more options for learning and connection. We’ve been busy marking our schedules and making our plans. Here are our best tips for making the most both the in person and online options.

    Aug 4, 2021

  • NVIDIA’s Synthetic Brain Images, Genomic Research Diversity, New Products

    Bio-IT World | Kings College London uses NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer to build synthetic brain images, Singapore researcher detect SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, American Heart Association Issues statement on genomic research diversity, and biobank acquisitions. Plus new products from 10x Genomics, Paradigm4, Thermo Fisher, Cresset.

    Aug 3, 2021

  • Russia Will Introduce Special Digital Genetic Passports

    Bio-IT World | Russia plans to introduce special digital genetic passports that will contain genome sequencing of each citizen of the country—the data could be further used for the formation of genetic profiles and identification of susceptibility to diseases, according to recent statements made by some senior officials of the Russian federal government and analysts.

    Jul 29, 2021

  • Duke, Regeneron, Micronoma Named 2021 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Winners

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World has announced the 2021 Innovative Practices Awards winners. Grand prize awards were granted to Duke Cancer Institute with University of California, San Francisco, Micronoma, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Pure Storage and the Folding@home project received honorable mention recognition. All four groups will be presenting their projects at the 2021 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston in September.

    Jul 28, 2021

  • 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