• A Deep Dive On mRNA Vaccines

    Bio-IT World | Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines were the focus of a symposium on COVID-19 vaccines held during last week’s COVID-19 and Cancer virtual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. To date, only two vaccines have received Emergency Use Authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and both are mRNA vaccines—one developed by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and BioNTech.

    Feb 11, 2021

  • Sema4 Announces Merger With CM Life Sciences

    Bio-IT World | Sema4 announced its planned merger with CM Life Sciences today. The transaction combines Sema4’s leading AI- and machine learning-powered integrated genomic and clinical open-architecture data platform, with CM Life Sciences, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, sponsored by affiliates of Casdin Capital, LLC and Corvex Management LP. The transaction is expected to provide up to $793 million in immediate cash proceeds.

    Feb 10, 2021

  • The Future of Our Blood Supply Chain is Digital

    Bio-IT World | The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our nation’s blood supply was not very apparent in public discussion. And yet the radical shifts in the demand for blood products, and the availability thereof, should be studied and analyzed to improve the robustness and resilience of our blood supply.

    Feb 10, 2021

  • GenomePaint: Interactive Visualization of the Genome

    Bio-IT World | The computational biology team at St. Jude has published the latest on GenomePaint, one of the visualization features in the St. Jude Cloud platform, in the January issue of Cancer Cell.

    Feb 9, 2021

  • Heparin Inhibits SARS-CoV-2, How Mutations Escape Immune Response, Retraining Generic Antibodies: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World | Genetic sequence deletions help SARS-CoV-2 escape antibodies, molecular behavior of COVID-19 drugs, and the latest COVID-19 forecasts include two new variants. Plus: N439K variant shows two-fold increase in binding affinity and heparin inhibits SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, could be repurposed.

    Feb 5, 2021

  • AI-Based Approach Crunches Real-World Data To Emulate Clinical Trials

    Bio-IT World | A computer scientist at The Ohio State University (OSU) recently demonstrated the potential of artificial intelligence to crunch real-world data and emulate randomized clinical trials, speeding the pace of drug repurposing.

    Feb 4, 2021

  • Is Precision Medicine Ready For Data From Billions Of Cells?

    Bio-IT World | Popular opinion is that two big shifts have changed the game for bioinformatics. The first is single cell ‘omics, the other is a more recent move to a new model of drug discovery that looks to leverage the vast amounts of human genetic data now being generated in support of precision medicine. But to achieve datasets with the 100,000s of patients and treatment conditions that are needed for statistical power in pharma R&D and precision medicine, IT tools to manage billions of cells are essential.

    Feb 3, 2021

  • Intel, Google Donate Compute Credits, Cloud Space To All Of Us Program

    Bio-IT World | Intel and Google have joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us Research Program in its historic effort to improve population health by making biomedical data from underrepresented groups available to COVID-19 researchers nationwide via the Researcher Workbench.

    Feb 2, 2021

  • H3Africa Consortium Primes A Continent For Large-Scale Genomics Research

    Bio-IT World | Only a fraction of the genetic diversity among African individuals had previously been surveyed—even by large-scale efforts such as the 1000 Genomes Project. That’s why H3Africa’s sequencing is so important. A study published last year in Nature found evidence for natural selection in and around 62 previously unreported genes.

    Feb 2, 2021

  • Bio-IT World Opens 2021 Innovative Practices Awards Program

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is accepting entries for the 2021 Innovative Practices Awards competition. The deadline for entry is March 19, 2021, and the $300 application fee will be waived for entrants who meet the early deadline of February 19, 2021.

    Jan 29, 2021

  • Profile of T Cells, Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies, Anti-Viral Targets: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World I Severe infection associated with myeloid immune cells, potential Achilles heel of coronaviruses identified, melatonin synthesized in lungs could have protective effect. Plus: NSAID use during COVID-19 is time-dependent on its harm or benefit and NAU to test Allarity drug against Coronavirus Variant B117.

    Jan 29, 2021

  • VAST Data’s New Architecture With NVIDIA, Mount Sinai’s New Center For Psychedelic Psychotherapy, More

    Bio-IT World | New products for high-content imaging, virus reagents and enrichment, software for small molecule design, and pharmacokinetic simulation. Plus: acquisitions in drug discovery services and partnerships for data analysis, single cell analysis, machine learning, and more.

    Jan 28, 2021

  • Promise of ISR Inhibitors In Treating Age-Related Cognitive Decline

    Bio-IT World | An intracellular signaling network known as the integrated stress response (ISR) is of growing interest to drug developers because it seems to be affecting so many clinical conditions, ranging from Down syndrome and traumatic brain injury (TBI) to hearing loss, some types of prostate cancer, and the natural process of aging, according to Susanna Rosi, Ph.D., director of neurocognitive research in the UCSF Brain and Spinal Injury Center.

    Jan 27, 2021

  • At Least Five Disease Variants, Pandemic Impact on Life Span, Role of Past Coronavirus Infection on Immunity: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World | A modeling platform validated in New York predicts the spread of COVID-19 in small towns and cities, Americans have lost more than a year of life expectancy, the role of antibodies from previous infections, and wastewater sequencing to track SARS-CoV-2 variants. Plus: new modeling tools to prioritize vaccine distribution and more efforts on drug repositioning.

    Jan 22, 2021

  • Deep Longevity Building An Arsenal of Aging Clocks

    Bio-IT World | In the not-too-distant future, people could be paying a monthly fee to access a long list of “aging clocks” serving as bellwethers of their health and efforts to improve their physical condition. Physicians might also be procuring medical-grade reports on the aging process of their patients. It is a business model Hong Kong startup Deep Longevity is banking on.

    Jan 21, 2021

  • Smart Data Management in the Race toward Effective Vaccines

    Bio-IT World | As vaccines for the novel coronavirus are starting to be rolled out across the world, all eyes are on the scientific community. Demand for novel therapeutics is higher today than ever before and will continue to be in the future. Whether you’re a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) or a vaccine manufacturer, smart data strategy is critical

    Jan 20, 2021

  • Dan Stanzione On Supercomputers, Pandemic Computing, and Predicting Hardware Needs

    Bio-IT World | TRENDS FROM THE TRENCHES—Dan Stanzione has been working at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin for three quarters of its 19-year tenure. Now the executive director and associate vice president of research, Stanzione runs TACC as both the research computing arm of the University of Texas as well as an independent National Science Foundation-funded supercomputing center. He sat down with Stan Gloss to talk about big compute, pandemics, and technology trends.

    Jan 19, 2021

  • Oxford Nanopore, NVIDIA Partner on GPU-Powered PromethION

    Bio-IT World | Oxford Nanopore Technologies and NVIDIA announced a collaboration this week to integrate the NVIDIA DGX Station A100 into Oxford Nanopore’s ultra-high throughput sequencing system, PromethION. Partnering the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU technology with the PromethION device aims to deliver the world’s most powerful sequencer that supports real-time analyses at scale and can also analyze any length fragment of DNA/RNA.

    Jan 15, 2021

  • PacBio: Year of Expansion, Whole-Genome Clinical Goals

    Bio-IT World | At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference yesterday, PacBio’s new CEO, laid out a route to the clinic for PacBio’s HiFi sequencing reads, and set a 2021 goal of expansion across the business: improving commercial footprint, driving product development pipelines, and establishing market leadership in whole-genome clinical sequencing.

    Jan 15, 2021

  • Novel, Short Form of ACE2, AI Learns ‘Language’ of Viral Mutations, Odd Structure of ORF8: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World I Single-dose nanoparticle vaccine triggers strong immune response in mice, mapping the unique structure of SARS-CoV-2 ORF8 protein, COVID-19 may eventually become as mild as common cold. Plus: Human lung bronchioalveolar tissue model successfully demonstrates viral replication along with potential therapy and mitochondria one of the first lines of defense.

    Jan 15, 2021