• Unified Under a Universal Language: The Pistoia Alliance’s IDMP Ontology

    Bio-IT World | Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) implementation greatly varies across organizations and regulatory jurisdictions, which impacts drug safety and pharmacovigilance. To ensure that organizations around the world can use a universal semantic interoperability based on FAIR data principles, the Pistoia Alliance has built an IDMP Ontology (IDMP-O Release 1), augmenting existing ISO IDMP standards set by the European Medical Agency.

    Jun 25, 2024

  • When Banks Say ‘No’ to Equipment Financing, It’s Not the End of the Story

    Bio-IT World | Thanks to emerging technologies, from generative AI to data platforms and robotic solutions, companies in the biotech and life science sectors are achieving amazing advances. But for every headline showcasing a success, there is a reminder of the abiding industry reality: countless promising companies are still struggling to acquire the equipment and technology they need to fuel product development and platform growth.

    Jun 21, 2024

  • Avoiding the Traps and Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence Development

    Bio-IT World | Artificial intelligence (AI) was the main topic at the 2024 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. While there was much excitement over new developments, there were also many discussions covering the obstacles that block the path to further progress—many of which have nothing to do with technology or data.

    Jun 19, 2024

  • Regeneron’s Platform Play for Protein Prediction at Scale

    Bio-IT World | AlphaFold was revolutionary to protein scientists and their work, but as soon as the new capabilities became clear, scientific demand exploded. Regeneron engineers used the AlphaFold2 model to create a custom, cloud-based solution to allow analysis of thousands of protein binding partners in parallel.

    Jun 18, 2024

  • Ruth Marinshaw on the State of Data in the Academic Sphere

    Bio-IT World | Data is a double-edged sword in the industry. It is a necessary tool for technological developments, especially artificial intelligence (AI), but the excess generation of data has become a thorn on the sides of researchers and companies. And for universities, they have their own sets of problems to deal with.

    Jun 13, 2024

  • UK Biobank Pivoting to Platform-Only Model For Big Data Sharing

    Bio-IT World | When it comes to big data, the largest amount comes from whole genome sequencing (WGS). At the population scale, WGS produces petabytes of information that for sharing purposes requires cloud computing capabilities. That realization came early to UK Biobank.

    Jun 12, 2024

  • NVIDIA Launches Generative AI-in-a-Box

    Bio-IT World | At COMPUTEX Taipei earlier this month, NVIDIA launched NIM—NVIDIA Inference Microservices—a simple, standardized way to add generative AI to applications. Data generation—rather than retrieval—is poised to take over computing.

    Jun 11, 2024

  • Automating FAIR, Clean Data Generation from Flow Cytometry at Regeneron

    Bio-IT World | Ronald Realubit, Principal Scientific Business Analyst (Therapeutic Ab Development) at Regeneron, presented a map of the Regeneron team members behind the Automated High-Throughput Flow Cytometry Data Processing Pipeline project, highlighting 38 team members by name. The pipeline was one of three Regeneron projects that won a 2024 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award, all sharing the “Informatics to Achieve Operational Excellence” category.

    Jun 6, 2024

  • Precise, Integrated Gene Correction and Integration Offers Therapeutic Benefits

    Bio-IT World | During his keynote address at last month’s PEGS Boston, David Liu, director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice-chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, described how the laboratory evolution of gene editing systems has enabled efficient and programmable gene correction or even whole gene integration.

    Jun 5, 2024

  • Oxford Nanopore’s Clive Brown Looks Back and Ahead

    Bio-IT World | The Oxford Nanopore vision was of a “new generation of single-strand sequencing technology, featuring accurate long reads of single-stranded DNA molecules,” Bio-IT World reported from the 2012 event. Today, Brown’s big ideas include whole-chromosome sequencing, flow cell loading without a pipette, and advances in chemistry, electrical engineering, and commercial format.

    Jun 4, 2024

  • Pan-RAS Inhibitor Offers Hope of Improved Pancreatic Cancer Prognosis

    Bio-IT World | A consortium of pancreatic cancer researchers sharing information in real time has shown that an oral pan-RAS inhibitor known as RMC-7977, developed by Revolution Medicines, effectively targets the common cancer-causing RAS proteins while minimally impacting normal cells—and did so across a comprehensive range of preclinical models in a series of similar experiments.

    May 30, 2024

  • Ambry Genetics, PacBio Take on Rare Diseases, Regeneron Makes TOP500 List, More

    Bio-IT World | Ambry Genetics and PacBio to support the Pediatric Mendelian Genomics Research Center (MGRC) program to better understand the underlying biology of rare diseases; Recursion’s BioHive-2 was dubbed No. 35 on the latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers; the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) launches its 100th version; more.

    May 29, 2024

  • Follow the Money: Funds for Alzheimer’s Research, CN Bio Accelerates Oncology Products, More

    Bio-IT World | Laurence Belfer gifts funds to MD Anderson Cancer Center to strengthen neurodegeneration research through the Belfer Neurodegeneration Consortium; CN Bio plans to accelerate its expanding product portfolio; more.

    May 28, 2024

  • Flagship Pioneering Lessons Learned Launching Biotech Startups

    Bio-IT World | John Damask is a cloud proponent; he makes no apologies for that. And his experience has mostly been with Amazon Web Services; he is clear on that too. With those disclosures out of the way, Damask offered a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style tour of cloud best practices and the most common startup cloud mistakes at last month’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, letting the audience choose the topics he dug into during the talk.

    May 23, 2024

  • Reevaluating Data Platforms: The Future of Decentralized Data

    Bio-IT World | At the 2024 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, artificial intelligence (AI) was the main topic stirring up discussions and debates, especially generative AI and its data platforms. Data platforms are crucial tools for AI models, yet there are several barriers that hinder their utilization, efficiency, and accessibility —and none of them are technical or data-related.

    May 22, 2024

  • Brain Stimulation Device Could Make Precision Mental Health A Reality

    Bio-IT World | In the not-too-distant future, disorders of the brain could be treated with the same precision as heart disease and cancer. The means will be a therapeutic brain-computer interface (BCI) the size of a small blueberry for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression that uses a similar type of implant technology as Elon Musk’s Neuralink for helping paralyzed people speak.

    May 21, 2024

  • Liquid Biopsy Under Development for Measuring Drug Response

    Bio-IT World | The lab of W. Andy Tao, professor of biochemistry at Purdue University, is pioneering a way to assess drug response based on metabolizing proteins found in circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs), which could serve as a surrogate of their expression level in the liver and become therapeutic targets for some cancers.

    May 16, 2024

  • New Test Looks at Unique Response of MS Patients to Epstein-Barr Virus

    Bio-IT World | Significant evidence now exists implicating the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) as a causal factor in the development of multiple sclerosis (MS), making treatment of the virus a priority. To that end, research scientists at Trinity College Dublin have developed a blood test to measure the immune response to EBV that could be used as an outcome measure in future clinical trials in people with established MS.

    May 15, 2024

  • AI System For Diagnosing Rare Diseases and Solving Medical Cold Cases

    Bio-IT World | Using an artificial intelligence (AI) model that was trained on millions of variants from identified genetic disorders and incorporates the complex decision-making process of human molecular scientists, investigators at Baylor College of Medicine are on track to automate the diagnosis of an enormous number of undiagnosed conditions.

    May 14, 2024

  • The Replication Crisis: How Can Open Science Improve the Scale of Reproducibility?

    Bio-IT World | For years, two of the key principles of science have been replication and the ability to produce consistent results. Yet, scientists across fields today are still grappling with challenges in ensuring the repeatability and reliability of their findings. More recently, this has been referred to as the ‘replication crisis’ or ‘reproducibility crisis’ and details the growing concerns around the lack of reproducibility in scientific studies.

    May 10, 2024