• PacBio’s Pink Desktop Platform, $500 Genome Chemistry

    Bio-IT World | This week at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting, Pacific Biosciences unveiled both its new SPRQ chemistry—pronounced “spark”— and its newest sequencing platform, Vega, a desktop, long-read sequencer with all the compute on board. Also it’s pink.

    Nov 7, 2024

  • New Data Suggests a More Expansive View of Heart Health Lipids

    Bio-IT World | The traditional LDL and HDL cholesterol tests may soon be obsolete as new research suggests they provide an incomplete view of heart health compared to other lipid molecules circulating in the blood. This shift stems from a recent study led by Dr. Cristina Legido-Quigley, a systems medicine expert at King’s College London and Steno Diabetes Centre, which analyzed lipids in children with obesity.

    Nov 4, 2024

  • AI Points to Drug Repurposing Opportunities for Diseases Without Cures

    Bio-IT World | Harvard scientists have succeeded in using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify promising drug candidates for diseases for which there are no examples of successful treatment. The graph foundation model, known as TxGNN, opens untold opportunities to repurpose drugs for the thousands of diseases afflicting small populations and exacting a huge toll in terms of both economics and human suffering.

    Oct 31, 2024

  • New 10x Instruments, Merck Acquires Modifi Biosciences, New Immunogenicity Bioanalysis Features, Partnerships, More

    Bio-IT World | Modifi Biosciences has been acquired by Merck; Sapio Sciences announces the addition of new immunogenicity bioanalysis features to its industry-leading lab informatics platform; and more.

    Oct 30, 2024

  • Follow the Money: Small Molecule Solutions AI Platform, MIT, Basecamp Research Collaboration, More

    Bio-IT World | Terray Therapeutics will enhance their integrated AI platform, tNova, which identifies and optimizes novel small molecule solutions to the most complex problems; Basecamp Research, in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, plans to advance their data collection and strengthen their AI capabilities; and more.

    Oct 29, 2024

  • AI Is Nothing Without An AI-Ready Data Strategy

    Bio-IT World | Applied artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming drug discovery research and development, accelerating the journey from lab to lifesaving therapies, and both the reality and the hype are very well known. Less obvious—almost 90% of the iceberg—is the critical role played by data.

    Oct 25, 2024

  • Cleveland Clinic Researchers Find Hope in Immune Cells’ Reaction to Immunotherapy

    Bio-IT World | There is much we still don’t know about the relationship between immune cells and cancer cells and how they interact and influence each other over the course of immune activating cancer therapies. Researchers at Cleveland Clinic are exploring these relationships and reported their results last month in Nature Medicine.

    Oct 23, 2024

  • Illumina’s New Desktop Sequencing Series Is Fast, Cheap, Simple

    Bio-IT World | Illumina unveiled its MiSeq i100 Series of sequencing systems last week during an online customer event, comprising two new benchtop instruments: MiSeq i100 and MiSeq i100 Plus Systems. The MiSeq i100 will be available to ship globally in 2025.

    Oct 17, 2024

  • Pistoia Alliance Research Finds Concerns on Security, Barriers, More

    Bio-IT World | As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become increasingly prevalent in the industry, there are still several concerns about its implementation. Mainly, how safe is it to use AI? What measures can be taken to increase and reinforce security? The Pistoia Alliance decided to find out.

    Oct 16, 2024

  • ‘Heretical’ Idea for Treating Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Moves Forward

    Bio-IT World | The clinical utility of treating cancer by modulating the estrogen receptor could radically and quickly expand, initially for patients with triple-negative breast cancer but potentially thereafter to those with melanoma and cancers found in the colon, lung, head, and neck. Hope springs from findings emerging from the lab of Professor Donald McDonnell, Ph.D., at Duke University School of Medicine, where the field of oral selective estrogen down-regulators was pioneered nearly two decades ago.

    Oct 15, 2024

  • Building Digital Architecture to Reach New Heights: Data and Knowledge Management for Pharma 4.0

    Bio-IT World | In early 2024, it was revealed that contract research and manufacturing organization WuXi Apptec had allegedly shared intellectual property with the Chinese government without their client’s consent. This breach of trust generated widespread concern and backlash, bringing renewed attention to the importance of proper data management and data sharing in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

    Oct 11, 2024

  • New Tool Helps Query Databases, Flag Anomalies in Data

    Bio-IT World | In a data science paper published in June, a team of researchers at MIT presents GenSQL, a system to ease answering data science questions. They published the work in Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. GenSQL is available open source in Clojure on GitHub.

    Oct 8, 2024

  • New Techniques Make RNA Accessible to Study Variants of Uncertain Significance

    Bio-IT World | New work from Dr. Lachlan Jolly and the University of Adelaide’s Neurobiology Research Group is using cutting-edge RNA-based techniques to resolve genetic variants of uncertain significance (VUS) that can't be diagnosed through traditional methods. Many disease-causing genes do not express RNA in accessible tissues like blood or skin, leaving many patients without a clear diagnosis. To overcome this, the team is utilizing two innovative methods—transactivation and transdifferentiation.

    Oct 3, 2024

  • Fresh Hope of a Functional Cure for HIV

    Bio-IT World | The longstanding reality for most individuals infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lifetime of taking antiretroviral therapy (ART). But the creation of an HIV-like virus particle that both reduces viral reservoirs and boosts the immune system could make it possible for at least half of all patients to achieve long-term control of the virus after a brief stint of treatment.

    Oct 2, 2024

  • New Alzheimer’s Approach Suggested by Data Mining

    Bio-IT World | In a paper published last month in Brain, researchers explored data from 24 past Alzheimer’s Disease trials and posited a new theory for why the most recent drugs have shown some success against the disease, and senior author Alberto Espay issued an open data challenge for pharma companies working in the space.

    Oct 1, 2024

  • Follow the Money: T Cell Engineering, Kidney Transplants, Intravascular Imaging Technology, More

    Bio-IT World | ArsenalBio plans to advance their lead programs through development invests in candidates for solid tumor cancers based on its proprietary T cell engineering technology; eGenesis moves to a first-in-human study for kidney transplant; SpectraWAVE will advance commercial expansion and product additions to their 510k-cleared HyperVue Imaging System; and more.

    Sep 26, 2024

  • Illumina Reacts to GRAIL Acquisition Ruling, AstraZeneca, Moffitt Cancer Center Partnership, 10x Genomics Platforms Mentioned, More

    Bio-IT World | Illumina welcomed the European Court of Justice's judgment ruling that the European Commission did not have jurisdiction over Illumina's acquisition of GRAIL; Moffitt Cancer Center announced a strategic collaboration with AstraZeneca that aims to accelerate the development of cell therapies, specifically chimeric antigen receptor T cell and T cell receptor therapies; 10x Genomics’ Chromium Single Cell Gene Expression and Xenium In Situ platforms in publication; and more.

    Sep 25, 2024

  • A Pill That Triggers a Desire to Exercise? Maybe... For Now, Just Go to the Gym

    Bio-IT World | What Wegovy has done for people who want to lose weight but dislike the work involved might one day find its match with a pill that pumps up a person’s desire to exercise—all by adjusting their level of interleukin 15 (IL-15), a cytokine that in the brain stimulates locomotor activity. At least that’s one of the promising possibilities dredged up by a study in mice finding a muscle-brain pathway controlling “eagerness to train more when we exercise."

    Sep 24, 2024

  • The Rise and Importance of Population-Scale Genome Programs

    Bio-IT World | With the wealth of population-scale projects going on, we have entered a golden age of genomics. Based on efforts such as the All of Us program in the U.S. and the UK Biobank, among many others, we are poised to discover more than we ever knew about natural genetic diversity, what’s considered “normal” human biology, and the continuum of health and disease.

    Sep 20, 2024

  • 2025 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Awards Call for Entries

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is accepting entries for the 2025 Innovative Practices Awards, a competition designed to recognize the most exciting partnerships and projects pushing the life sciences industry forward.

    Sep 18, 2024