• Edico Announces $22M Round

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Edico Genome announced today it has raised $22 million in a Series B financing to expand market adoption and product development of its DRAGEN platform. New investor Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, led the round and all existing investors participated, including Qualcomm Ventures, Axon Ventures and life sciences industry executive Greg Lucier.

    May 9, 2017

  • PacBio's Juliet Minor Variant Software

    Bio-IT World At PacBio’s SMRT scientific symposium and developers meeting last week held at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, Lance Hepler, with PacBio, announced three apps coming in the next SMRT Analysis release: minor variants, structural variation, and multiplexed microbe WGS.

    May 8, 2017

  • NIH Grant Limits Rile Biomedical Research Community

    Nature News & Comment | Scientists are split over whether limiting grant support to individuals will help young researchers or hurt collaboration.

    May 5, 2017

  • 2017 Bio-IT World Best Of Show People's Choice Award Contenders

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World has announced the 2017 Best of Show competition with the Bio-IT World People’s Choice award. The four awards named by the judges and the People’s Choice Award will be announced at a live event on the Bio-IT World Expo floor at 5:30 pm on Wednesday, May 24.

    May 4, 2017

  • Anniversary Agenda: A Preview of #BioIT17

    Bio-IT World At the end of this month, Bio-IT World celebrates a milestone: the 15th anniversary of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Fifteen years after we launched the event, it has grown into a community that we are proud of, a community of clever, innovative people working from all sides on the problems affecting life sciences. But we’re excited about more than just a champagne toast at this year’s celebration. Our 15th anniversary program in Boston, May 23-25, might be the best yet.

    May 3, 2017

  • Heymann and Bhowmik Launch Converge Boston’s Latest Venture Firm

    Xconomy | Boston's tech investing landscape has changed a lot in the past couple of years, with a wave of new early-stage funds popping up. That activity continued this week with the unveiling of Converge.

    May 3, 2017

  • Science Wins Reprieve In US Budget Deal

    Nature News & Comment | Congress gives National Institutes of Health a big boost and avoids cuts to research agencies sought by Trump.

    May 2, 2017

  • Personalis, Dovetail Genomics, DataDirect Networks, And More: News From April 2017

    Bio-IT World Brief | News, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community from innovating companies, organizations, and universities, including Personalis, Dovetail Genomics, DataDirect Networks, and more.

    Apr 27, 2017

  • BioRxiv Preprint Server Gets Cash Boost From Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

    Nature News & Comment | Money will be used to develop open-source platform and help put articles in web-friendly formats.

    Apr 26, 2017

  • NovaSeq Orders Bring Pleasant Surprises, Says deSouza

    Bio-IT World Illumina held its first quarter earnings calls yesterday. Francis deSouza, President and CEO, reported that the launch of the company’s new sequencing platform, NovaSeq, “surpassed our expectations, with more than 135 orders in Q1.” “As far out as we can see, there’s an insatiable demand for high throughput sequencing,” deSouza said.  

    Apr 26, 2017

  • Four Decades Of Hacking Biotech And Yet Biology Still Consumes Everything

    Forbes | Computer-aided drug design is a key contributor to pharma R&D today, but its just one of many contributors. Biology still consumes everything, and is the real constraint on developing new medicines today. Healthy, realistic skepticism regarding recent "software-eats-biotech" claims is needed.

    Apr 26, 2017

  • Genomenon Wins $1.8M NIH Grant To Automatically Curate Genomic Literature

    Bio-IT World Brief | Genomenon today announced a $1.8M grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health. The fast-track Small Business Innovation Research grant, awarded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, will fund Genomenon's further innovation in genomic analysis, efficiently streamlining the laborious literature research and curation process leading to faster patient diagnosis.

    Apr 25, 2017

  • Biotech Is The New Digital Says MIT Media Lab Founder

    Dezeen | Biotechnology is going to "govern the next decade of thought" at research institutions like the MIT Media Lab, says its founder Nicholas Negroponte.

    Apr 25, 2017

  • DNA Tests and Sometimes Surprising Results

    The New York Times | Think you know your racial background? A communications studies project involving ancestry DNA testing has led to interesting conversations on identity.

    Apr 24, 2017

  • Hannes Smarason On The Future Of The Platform For WuXi NextCODE

    Diagnostics World | Hannes Smarason, WuXi NextCode's new CEO, is looking to enable the use of the WuXi NextCode platform across a multitude of applications. The goal is to create a Contract Genomics Organization, an underlying platform for genomic data that brings together everything needed to empower healthcare.

    Apr 24, 2017

  • Biogen Says Its Back and Ready for ‘Highly Active’ Dealmaking

    Bloomberg | Biogen Inc. is ready to make some deals. "We're moving, and we're back in terms of augmenting the pipeline," research and development head Michael Ehlers said Friday in an interview. An agreement last week to pay Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. $300 million upfront for an experimental Alzheimer's drug is "hopefully just the beginning of a set of very rigorous but highly active deals."

    Apr 24, 2017

  • The Go-To Gene Sequencing Machine With Very Strange Results

    WIRED | An update to Illumina's gene sequencing technology could have contaminated the results of recent high-sensitivity data produced on the machines.

    Apr 21, 2017

  • Geisinger Accused Of Coercing Patients To Participate In Genetic Research

    PennLive.com | The Geisinger Health System has been accused by two of its former doctors of coercing patients to participate in genetic research. The accusation was made in a wrongful termination suit filed this week.

    Apr 20, 2017

  • Google Offshoot Starts A 10000-Person Study To Plumb Human Biology

    Forbes | Verily, formerly known as Google Life Sciences, is launching a long-awaited study whose methods may offer a realistic blueprint for how tech could change medicine. But it's also an emblem of how long that transformation will take.

    Apr 20, 2017

  • Building BioTeam’s Texas Sandbox

    Bio-IT World | In 2015, Ari Berman, BioTeam’s Vice President and General Manager of Consulting Services decided that the consultancy needed a better spot for non-digital products. BioTeam launched its Convergence Lab, datacenter space hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, Texas, dedicated to BioTeam. Now with a maturing business model, the Convergence Lab is beginning to play host to some of BioTeam's best ideas. 

    Apr 19, 2017