• A Skeptic Converts: Tom Plasterer’s move from Big Pharma to AI Startup

    Bio-IT World | For more than a dozen years, Tom Plasterer has held roles at AstraZeneca both in research IT and in more science-facing positions including translational medicine. Along the way, he was beating the drum for FAIR data—data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable— and knowledge graphs, playing an active role in both the FAIR community and the Pistoia Alliance.

    Aug 14, 2024

  • Safe and Intriguing ‘Nature’s Drugs’ Taking on Complex Diseases

    Bio-IT World | The cost of bringing a drug to market has, by some estimates, ballooned to $3 billion and the central problem could be the “misapplication of technology.” Since completion of the Human Genome Project, the focus had shifted heavily toward orphan drugs with a single genetic target, suitable only to highly targeted genetic technology platforms.

    Aug 13, 2024

  • Recursion, Exscientia Merge AI Drug Discovery Companies

    Bio-IT World | Recursion and Exscientia have entered into a definitive agreement to combine Recursion’s scaled biology exploration and translational capabilities with Exscientia’s precision chemistry design and small molecule automated synthesis capabilities.

    Aug 8, 2024

  • Singapore Launches Long-Read Population Sequencing Program with PacBio, Oxford Nanopore

    Bio-IT World | Singapore’s National Precision Medicine (NPM) program has launched a long-read sequencing project to gain deeper insights into Asian genetic diversity. The program, Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) has appointed both Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and PacBio (PacBio) to deliver sequencing.

    Aug 8, 2024

  • Howard Jacob on How AbbVie’s ARCH is Unlocking Major Opportunities

    Bio-IT World | At last year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, AbbVie won an Innovative Practices Award for their AbbVie R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH). Their data platform is designed to provide access to knowledge in a faster and more automated way, as well as an easier way to extract insights and connect disparate datasets. Today, three years after the launch of ARCH, AbbVie has made great strides in data convergence with the platform.

    Aug 7, 2024

  • GE HealthCare, AWS Collaborate on Gen AI Models

    Bio-IT World | GE HealthCare and Amazon Web Services have announced a strategic collaboration to develop purpose-built foundation models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications designed to help clinicians improve medical diagnostics and patient care.

    Aug 6, 2024

  • BioTeam Acquired by British n2 Group

    Bio-IT World | BioTeam announced its acquisition today by British firm n2 Group. BioTeam will be a US-based, independent business within n2 Group. Financial details have not been disclosed.

    Aug 2, 2024

  • Youth Diabetes Researchers Invited to Dip Into POND, Make a Hypothesis

    Bio-IT World | Soaring rates of youth prediabetes and diabetes over the past few decades have prompted a multidisciplinary team of experts from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) to create a dataset unifying potentially important clues about how to personalize interventions and devise better prevention strategies.

    Aug 1, 2024

  • AI Taking on the Holy Grail of Diagnostics: Predicting Drug Response

    Bio-IT World | Machine learning models can be superior to radiologists when it comes to processing complex images and putting a predictive label on them, particularly at scale. he problems currently being studied in biomedicine with machine learning, such as identifying the subtype of cancer a patient has, are ones that have been largely ignored for a long time.

    Jul 30, 2024

  • PacBio, FormBio Unifying AAV Industry, Insilico Medicine Introduces New Products, More

    Bio-IT World | Form Bio and PacBio announced a range of new initiatives aimed at advancing and unifying the AAV industry; Insilico Medicine has introduced new products under Pharma AI: Biology42: PandaOmics Box, Precious-3 GPT, and Science42: DORA; and more.

    Jul 25, 2024

  • Formation Bio Expands AI Capabilities, Element Biosciences Commercializing Platform, More

    Bio-IT World | Formation Bio raises $372 million in Series D for their AI-driven drug discovery platform; Element Biosciences nets $277 million to launch combined sequencing and cyto-profiling platform; and more.

    Jul 24, 2024

  • AI Could Assist in the Quest for New Antibiotics

    Bio-IT World | Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is “on every thinking individual’s list of existential threats,” as well as one of the cheapest ones that can be solved relative to others such as hunger and climate change. The answers will come by melding human and machine intelligence in the search for new antibiotics.

    Jul 23, 2024

  • Ambitious IDMP Standards Leave Little Breathing Space

    Bio-IT World | The EMA’s Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) standards continues to require significant effort from biopharmas trying to keep up. IDMP was developed to ensure the exchange of reliable medicinal information by providing standard definitions for how companies define and describe products.

    Jul 19, 2024

  • AstraZeneca, Tempus Collaborate on AI Project for Cost Effective Industry R&D

    Bio-IT World | With the rising costs of pharmaceutical industry R&D, achieving breakthroughs in some of the hardest-to-treat diseases, such as cancer, is becoming increasingly expensive. This presents a major challenge to developers in bringing efficient, affordable treatments to patients. AstraZeneca and Tempus teamed up to create a framework that can gather insights, discover novel drug targets, and aim to develop therapeutics for the broader oncology community.

    Jul 17, 2024

  • At Harvard, Scientists Partner with AI Using the Language of Proteins

    Bio-IT World | Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new frontier in biomedical research, with large language models changing the way science is done from writing code and brainstorming research ideas to helping do research and conducting literature reviews. In some of its latest applications, generative AI has been used in designing molecules with insights produced at a scale and speed not possible with traditional deep learning methods alone.

    Jul 16, 2024

  • How Large Language Model-Based AI Will Transform Drug Safety & Regulatory Processes

    Bio-IT World | Training and validating intelligent automation systems for life sciences R&D purposes can undermine the business case. But the large language models (LLMs) used to power Generative AI (GenAI) is changing that and bolstering compliance, enabling on-the-fly data discovery, “in context” learning, and narrative extrapolation.

    Jul 12, 2024

  • New Biomarker Offers Hope of Detecting Alzheimer's in Asymptomatic Stages

    Bio-IT World | Until recently, all the available therapeutic options for treating Alzheimer’s disease were designed to reduce symptoms rather than address causes of the disease. But with two beta-amyloid antibodies now approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and tau-targeting agents in clinical trials, hopes are rising that Alzheimer’s progression can be delayed if not stopped.

    Jul 10, 2024

  • Illumina Acquires Fluent BioSciences Single-Cell Technology

    Bio-IT World | Illumina has acquired Fluent BioSciences, developer of an emerging and highly differentiated single-cell technology. Fluent Biosciences is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Illumina and was acquired with cash on hand.

    Jul 9, 2024

  • Regeneron Uses Voice-to-Text for Science-First Data Digitization Efforts for Animal Research

    Bio-IT World | When Regeneron began exploring how to digitize scientific information in lab environments, IT engineers didn’t begin by brainstorming their own ideas. They began by shadowing scientists.

    Jul 9, 2024

  • Building On Biotech Confidence With Strategic R&D

    Bio-IT World | The biotech sector has weathered some recent headwinds in the funding market but is marked by a general air of confidence as we come to close the first quarter of 2024. This confidence was noted in our recent survey of over 130 decision makers in biotech companies, where we found that despite challenging conditions, 87% of respondents reported at least some confidence and 38% were very confident in the overall success of their product.

    Jul 1, 2024