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Even At $500K, Gene Therapy Could Be A Bargain For Some Diseases
MIT Technology Review | A one-time gene therapy that costs half a million dollars sounds crazy until you add up what it costs to treat some diseases over a lifetime.
Sep 21, 2017
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CRISPR Used To Peer Into Human Embryo's First Days
Nature News & Comment | Gene-edited embryos enable researchers to unpick role of a crucial gene, with more studies likely to follow.
Sep 20, 2017
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Edico Genome’s DRAGEN Now Available On Illumina’s BaseSpace Sequence Hub
Bio-IT World Brief | Edico Genome today announced the availability of its DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform on Illumina’s BaseSpace Sequence Hub, enabling users to now run DRAGEN instances to enhance the accuracy and speed of their secondary analysis of next-generation sequencing data.
Sep 19, 2017
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Amazon Announces Per-Second Billing For EC2 Instances And EBS Volumes
AWS Blog | Amazon has announced that, effective October 2, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments. Per-second billing also applies to Amazon EMR and AWS Batch.
Sep 18, 2017
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Earlham Institute Presents Sequence Alignment Using Optalysys’ Optical Correlator Computing System
Bio-IT World | 2017 Best Practices Awards | The Earlham Institute are working with Optalysys to apply Optalysys’ optical computing system to life science applications. The first release of the computing system is scheduled for early 2018, which both organizations say will be capable of performing a number of different DNA-based local sequence alignment applications.
Sep 18, 2017
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Moderna Ends “Venture” Experiment, Dissolves Four Startups
Xconomy | Moderna Therapeutics announced today that it is ending the experiment to hatch startups as wholly-owned subsidaries, bringing all their experimental drugs back into the Moderna nest.
Sep 14, 2017
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Brainin Joins WuXi NextCODE, Prioritizes Actionability Of Genome
Bio-IT World | WuXi NextCODE today announced the appointment of Rob Brainin as executive vice president and chief operating officer. Brainin joins the company from Illumina, where he was vice president and general manager of life sciences and applied genomics.
Sep 13, 2017
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IBM Expands Certified Public Cloud Infrastructure For SAP HANA
Bio-IT World Brief | IBM today announced the availability of new SAP-certified bare metal servers for SAP HANA platform deployments in the IBM Cloud and new configurations for VMware environments. The new cloud infrastructure-as-a-service solutions are designed to give enterprises the power and performance they need to manage their mission-critical applications running on SAP HANA.
Sep 12, 2017
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Alexion Cutting 600 Jobs And Moving Headquarters In Major Shakeup
STAT | Alexion, once one of biotech's biggest success stories, is eliminating 20% of its global workforce as it struggles to map out a brighter future.
Sep 12, 2017
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Long-Read Sequencing Data Enables Structural Variant Discovery For Clinical And Disease Research
Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | The advent of single molecule, real-time sequencing, with average read lengths exceeding 12 kb, has allowed scientists to reliably detect structural variation for the first time. These latest studies have shown that previous human genome data sets have dramatically underrepresented the number of structural variants—along with their effect on health and disease.
Sep 11, 2017
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Amid Setback Researchers Forge Ahead with “Off-the-Shelf” Immune Cells to Treat Cancer
MIT Technology Review | The approach could treat patients in dire need faster at a lower price, but major questions remain about safety.
Sep 8, 2017
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Patients Without Traditional Cancer Screening Find Allies In Maccabi And Medial EarlySign
Bio-IT World | 2017 Best Practices Awards | Maccabi Healthcare System is using Medial EarlySign’s clinical decision support tool to find colon cancer patients among individuals who didn’t go through traditional channels for screening.
Sep 8, 2017
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Does Your Genome Predict Your Face? Not Quite Yet
MIT Technology Review | Genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter says if he had your genome he could pick you out of a crowd. According to two experts who reviewed the famed genomics expert's claim, however, that's not necessarily true.
Sep 7, 2017
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At Vanderbilt, NCI’s Cooperative Human Tissue Network Relies On Lean Principles For Efficiency
Bio-IT World | The National Cancer Institute’s Cooperative Human Tissue Network (CHTN) provides human tissues and fluids from routine procedures to investigators who use human biospecimens in their research. Unlike tissue banks, the CHTN works prospectively with each investigator to tailor specimen acquisition and processing to meet their specific project requirements.
Sep 7, 2017
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IBM Pitched Watson As A Revolution In Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close
STAT | Three years after IBM began selling Watson for Oncology to recommend cancer treatments, it's falling short of the lofty expectations IBM created for it.
Sep 6, 2017
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Human Longevity Researchers Use Whole Genome Sequence Data And Machine Learning To Identify Individuals Through Face And Other Physical Trait Prediction
Bio-IT World Brief | Researchers from Human Longevity have published a study in which individual faces and other physical traits were predicted using whole genome sequencing data and machine learning. This work was published in the journal Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences.
Sep 5, 2017
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GenePattern Notebook Environment Needs Only A Web Browser To Run Analyses
Bio-IT World Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have launched a new GenePattern Notebook environment, which combines the dynamic capabilities of an electronic analysis notebook with the ease of use of a point-and-click interface to hundreds of genomic tools.
Aug 31, 2017
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Renewed Attention Sees New Progress For Hepatitis B
Bio-IT World | The HBV field has seen increased attention from industry research in the past few years, influenced by the success of new hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapies. After scientists realized HCV could be cured, they turned their attention to hepatitis B, hoping to develop a cure for it also.
Aug 31, 2017
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FDA Approval Brings First Gene Therapy To The United States
Bio-IT World Brief | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a historic action today making the first gene therapy available in the United States, ushering in a new approach to the treatment of cancer and other serious and life-threatening diseases.
Aug 30, 2017
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Edico, DNAnexus Launch $20, 90-minute Whole Genome Analysis
Bio-IT World Edico Genome and DNAnexus, Inc. today announced the availability of Edico Genome’s DRAGEN on Amazon Web Service’s EC2 F1/FPGA instances via DNAnexus. For a limited time, the cost to analyze a whole genome at 35X coverage will be $20 and take about an hour and a half, Pieter van Rooyen said.
Aug 30, 2017