• Follow the Money: Microbiome, ‘Omics, Vaccine Patches

    Bio-IT World | Money for oral microbiome drugs, ‘omics, a biology plus technology transistor, digital biomarker platform, a vaccine patch that doesn’t require refrigeration, and more.

    Oct 28, 2020

  • Illumina Launches DRAGEN V3.7, Talks ML, Truth Challenges, All Of Us

    Bio-IT World | Illumina is launching version 3.7 of its DRAGEN bio-IT platform this week, Rami Mehio, Vice President, Bioinformatics and Instrument Software at Illumina, told Bio-IT World last week. The newest release will include DRAGEN for Single Cell RNA, unique molecular identifier (UMI) support including UMI-aware small variant calling, CYP2D6 genotyping, and accuracy gains in both germline variant calling and tumor-only analysis.

    Oct 27, 2020

  • Clinical Data Visualizations at BMS Merge Trial and Real-World Data

    Bio-IT World | The probability of success is low in early drug discovery and gets progressively more expensive on the journey to marketing approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To “fail early and fail often” has thus become the mantra of medicine developers needing to direct resources to the candidates most likely to triumph, says Philip Ross, director of translational bioinformatics data science at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). Only 9.6% of drugs that make it to phase I trials ever get FDA approved.

    Oct 26, 2020

  • ‘High-Risk, High-Reward’ Approach To Finding Alzheimer’s Disease Treatments

    Bio-IT World The quest to find new medicines for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may finally make some headway, thanks to a Target Enablement to Accelerate Therapy Development for Alzheimer’s Disease (TREAT-AD) project that is taking a “high-risk, high-reward” approach to diversifying the drug development pipeline, according to Lara Mangravite, president of Sage Bionetworks. The Seattle-based nonprofit is partnered with Emory University and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) on the initiative.

    Oct 19, 2020

  • FOXP3 Protein Inhibited, Blocking Factor D Protein May Prevent Inflammatory Response, App Crowdsources Drug Candidates: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World I Cloud-based tool, IDseq, allows tracking of emerging pathogens, scientist who discovered SARS captures detailed look of immune system response to COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 may become endemic, ORF3B identified as viral factor that impairs immune response, age is an independent factor to virus susceptibility, group of 80 researchers warns against herd immunity approach, high dose favipiravir had significant effect on preventing and treating virus in hamster model, REGN-COV2 antibody ‘cocktail’ offers protection in pre-clinical trial on macaques. Plus: SARS-CoV antibodies effectively neutralize SARS-CoV-2 infection in cultured cells, international open access database aims to reduce duplication of ongoing COVID-19 research and more.

    Oct 15, 2020

  • Proving The Value Of Preventive Genomics

    Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo closed out with a plenary keynote presentation on preventive genomics by Robert Green, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist who directs the G2P Research Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute. Data-sharing difficulties were a recurring theme at this year’s conference but, as the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative has demonstrated, it is possible to combine genomic data to rapidly explore markers of disease, he says.

    Oct 14, 2020

  • Researcher-Driven Data Stewardship, Storage: Trends from the Trenches 2020

    Bio-IT World  | On its 10th anniversary, the annual Trends from the Trenches presentation from Chris Dagdigian, co-founder and principle consultant of BioTeam, and friends had lost none of its characteristic candor and punch—even in a virtual environment and even as Dagdigian successfully continued to limit his own speaking time.

    Oct 13, 2020

  • The Great Data Science Promise For COVID-19, Opioid Addiction

    Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Virtual launched last week with an opening plenary keynote from Drs. Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science at NIH and Rebecca Baker, Director of the HEAL Initiative at NIH.

    Oct 11, 2020

  • Novel T Cell Subset, Nitric Oxide Effective Treatment Option, SoCal cases linked to New York: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World | MIT’s preprint reviewers debunk synthetic SARS-CoV-2 paper, genetic analysis of virus samples show most COVID-19 cases in Southern California early in the pandemic are linked to New York state via Europe, not directly from China, vaccines should not be affected by the dominant ‘G-strain’, severe cases of COVID-19 develop a novel T cell subset that can potentially kill B cells, and MS drug inhibits virus growth. Plus, NIH funds COVID-10 vaccine using bovine adenovirus.

    Oct 8, 2020

  • Bio-IT World Virtual: Gamifying Discovery, Human-in-the-Loop AI, New Data Commons Model

    Bio-IT World  Day two of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Virtual was highlighted by a plenary keynote on artificial intelligence (AI) and citizen science, a new data commons maturity model, guidance for FAIRifying data, augmented intelligence systems for biological data, and much more. 

    Oct 7, 2020

  • Bio-IT World Virtual: First Plenary, AI Workshops, Globus For Data Transfer

    Bio-IT World  The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Virtual launched today with an open plenary keynote from Drs. Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science at NIH and Rebecca Baker, Director of the HEAL Initiative at NIH. The rest of the day was full of workshops covering AI in clinical trials and drug discovery, tools for moving data quickly and safely, wearables to gather data, and much more.

    Oct 6, 2020

  • 10x Genomics Announces Two In Situ Sequencing Acquisitions

    Bio-IT World  10x Genomics today announced its second in situ sequencing acquisition: Boston-based ReadCoor, Inc. for cash and stock consideration of $350 million. In late August, 10x Genomics’ acquired Stockholm-based Cartana, developers of in situ RNA analysis technology.

    Oct 5, 2020

  • Culprit Mutations, Risky (Neandertal) Variants, Genomic Analysis App: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World | Genetic variations not driving outcomes, bio-sensing viral translation, pursuit of a passive vaccine, an Android app that analyzes the SARS-CoV-2 genome, potential antibody cocktails, targeting the hairpin, spike protein may be superantigen, implicating MAIT cells, three mutations common to COVID cases in the U.S., naturally occurring lipid and enzyme hold promise, research using breathing human lungs cells, widespread preexisting immunity, and a Neandertal gene variant that triples the risk of severe disease. Plus, an interactive exhibition about COVID-19 and an international team of experts will study how viral diseases "spill over" from animals to humans.

    Oct 2, 2020

  • A Computational Approach to Modeling COVID-19

    Bio-IT World | In months since March, the biotech community has rallied to identify how our unique perspectives and skills can help with the COVID-19 pandemic. The computational biologists at QuartzBio were no different. Although the research team wasn’t generating their own COVID-19 data, the collaborative culture was generating and sharing raw data to play with, so the QuartzBio team began building models.  

    Oct 2, 2020

  • GA4GH Announces Strategic Roadmap, Connection Demos

    Bio-IT World The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) has announced the release of its 2020-2021 Strategic Roadmap yesterday at the virtual GA4GH 8th Plenary Meeting, and released three 2020 Connection Demos to illustrate the deployments of GA4GH standards.

    Sep 30, 2020

  • Bio-IT World Expo New Product Showcase Voting Opens

    Bio-IT World | Voting is open now for the 2020 Bio-IT World Best of Show Awards. This annual new product award highlights entries that are innovative, progressive, and will demonstrably improve the bio-IT industry. This year's finalists include new products from BC Platforms, Benchling, ConvergeHEALTH, Flywheel, Genedata, Genestack, Globus, GNS Healthcare, Igneous, Illumina, Kanda Software, LabTwin, Lifebit, Linguamatics, NetApp, PercayAI, PetaGene, QIAGEN, Qumulo, Rescale, Riffyn, Synthace, Univa, and Zifo Technologies.

    Sep 30, 2020

  • 3 Game-changing Cybersecurity Practices Pharmaceuticals Should Take into Consideration

    Bio-IT World Pharmaceutical breakthroughs and medical research comprise an immeasurably important chunk of the global healthcare industry, warranting an equally robust cybersecurity infrastructure. The healthcare industry is no stranger to the devices of cybercriminals who target hospitals, clinics, research institutions, and pharmaceutical companies in search of highly expensive personal health information to be sold on the darknet.

    Sep 29, 2020

  • More ‘Omics for SARS-CoV-2, Insights into the Spike Protein, Crowdsourcing Questions: COVID-19 Updates

    Bio-IT World | A Canadian team shares a new mechanism of action for remdesivir, data science groups have computed consensomes (gene expression in the virus) and interactomes (potential molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis) and cryoEM images the spike protein. Plus, NIH funding for new vaccines and the Reliable Response Data Discovery consortium takes COVID-19 patient data questions.

    Sep 25, 2020

  • Ecological Modeling Of Gut Microbiome Points To Probiotic Cures

    Bio-IT World Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), the idea of using fecal material from a healthy person to treat others who are sick, has been proposed for challenging conditions ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to autism and obesity. But to date, robust evidence from randomized clinical trials exists only for the use of FMT to treat recurrent C. difficile infection.

    Sep 24, 2020

  • The Role of Data Management in Advancing Biology

    Bio-IT World Kjiersten Fagnan had a plan: she would be an engineer, work for a company, and write software all day. But biology is intriguing and now Fagnan is the Chief Informatics Officer at the Joint Genome Institute. She recently spoke with Stan Gloss, founding partner at the BioTeam, about the community challenges around creating and sharing more useful data, and how “human engineering” can help advance biology.

    Sep 21, 2020