• PrecisionFDA Consistency Challenge Will Benchmark the Basic Software Tools of Genetic Research

    Bio-IT World | The first challenge hosted in the FDA's cloud-based precisionFDA platform will score different computational pipelines' ability to accurately call variants from raw DNA sequence data, in a public competition meant to shed light on some of the most essential tools in genomics.

    Mar 4, 2016

  • Alaska’s Biotech Sugar Daddy Is Showering Money on Startups

    Bloomberg.com | Alaska's economic eminence stems from the discovery of oil on the North Slope in the 1960s. But its more recent crown as a biotech sugar daddy started in March 2013 with a chance meeting on a flight from Boston to Seattle.

    Mar 3, 2016

  • Precision for Medicine Transforms Big Data Into Actionable Information

    Bio-IT World | Precision for Medicine will formally launch its immuno-analytics platform solution this month, the latest addition to its PATH suite of tools for contending with big 'omics data even when working with small sample sizes.

    Mar 2, 2016

  • February News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | The latest products and announcements from around the industry, including the introduction of Arvados to Microsoft Azure, and an online solution for metagenomics through One Codex.

    Mar 1, 2016

  • New CRISPR-Like Defense System Discovered in Giant Viruses

    The Atlantic | The bizarre Mimivirus has become even more perplexing, as scientists uncover a genetic element called MIMIVRE, highly analogous to CRISPR, that it uses to fight off smaller viruses.

    Feb 29, 2016

  • NanoString Reveals Novel Sequencing Method for Cancer Assays

    Bio-IT World | NanoString Technologies, a Seattle company with a small but comfortable niche in automated genetic analysis, is preparing to make the leap into DNA and RNA sequencing, with a highly novel process it calls Hyb and Seq.

    Feb 29, 2016

  • Obama Is Using the Bully Pulpit to Set Patient Data Free

    Forbes | At a White House meeting on the President's Precision Medicine Initiative, open data, shared with patients and between centers, is the centerpiece of a national plan.

    Feb 25, 2016

  • Verily, Vanderbilt Named to Launch U.S. Precision Medicine Pilot

    Reuters | The National Institutes of Health on Thursday named Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, as advisor to Nashville's Vanderbilt University in a pilot program to launch the Precision Medicine Initiative outlined by President Barack Obama last year.

    Feb 25, 2016

  • Illumina Sues Oxford Nanopore Technologies Over Composition of Nanopores

    Bio-IT World | Oxford Nanopore Technologies, creator of the world's first and only nanopore sequencer, has found itself the target of a lawsuit by genomics giant Illumina, which does not make a nanopore sequencer but does license two patents related to a very specific iteration of the technology.

    Feb 24, 2016

  • Toward Ubiquitous Computational Life Sciences

    Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | Wolfgang Gentzsch of UberCloud argues that the expansion of software containers for life sciences applications is moving biology and medicine closer to a state of 'ubiquitous computing,' where compute infrastructure becomes all but invisible to most end users.

    Feb 23, 2016

  • Diabetes Diagnoses Lead to DIY Glucose Monitoring and Insulin Production

    New York Times | Parents of children with diabetes have led an egalitarian push for improved technology to monitor the condition, and to even develop cheaper insulin.

    Feb 23, 2016

  • DDN Introduces Solution for Enterprise-Wide Mobile Data Access

    Bio-IT World News Brief | DDN, creator of the WOS object storage platform for simplified data storage and access at multi-petabyte scale, has launched a new product for enterprise data governance as employees access files at home and through mobile devices.

    Feb 22, 2016

  • Building a Social Reader Reality

    Bio-IT World Brief | More than eight months after its Kickstarter launch, N of Everyone is pushing ahead with its social reader product. Today Reader lists more than 3.5 million papers available for reading, comment, search, and discussion and has 700 registered users.

    Feb 17, 2016

  • IndiGenomics Aims to Expand the Horizons of DNA Sequencing

    BBC News | TED Fellow Keolu Fox has been describing his hopes to include indigenous groups in future genetic testing.

    Feb 17, 2016

  • 2016 Open Source Awards Finalists Named

    Bio-IT World | Bioinformatics.org has announced the nominees for the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Award. Voting is open now to Bioinformatics.org members. The winner will be announced at the 2016 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.

    Feb 17, 2016

  • Seven Bridges Unveils Cancer Genomics Cloud, Takes on Private Funding

    Bio-IT World | This morning, Seven Bridges Genomics announced the opening of its Cancer Genomics Cloud, an online platform for accessing and analyzing public data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. The National Cancer Institute commissioned the platform as a way to make TCGA data easier to query and more available to small labs with limited compute resources.

    Feb 16, 2016

  • Amazon Web Services acquires Italian SaaS vendor

    Computerworld | Amazon Web Services has agreed to buy Nice, an Italian vendor of high-performance computing software and services, to extend its as-a-service offering.

    Feb 15, 2016

  • Google Bets on Health

    Bloomberg | "The most you can lose is all your money," says Bill Maris, the founder of Google Ventures who is making big investments in the riskier, more highly regulated fields of health other Silicon Valley investors have avoided.

    Feb 15, 2016

  • Legal Tussle Delays Launch of Huge Toxicity Database

    Nature News | Toxicologists at Johns Hopkins have charted the health risks of nearly 10,000 chemicals to help predict the toxicity of untested substances.

    Feb 11, 2016

  • 10X Genomics Reveals Upgraded Platform with New Features for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

    Bio-IT World | 10X Genomics, whose GemCode platform allows for much better structural variant resolution and haplotype phasing during short-read sequencing experiments, has released a new system, Chromium, that builds on the efficiency of GemCode and can label RNA molecules from individual cells.

    Feb 11, 2016