• Data Scientists = Research Parasites?

    Forbes | David Shaywitz weighs in on yesterday's editorial from NEJM calling data scientists "research parasites." He was glad, he says, for a major objection to finally be laid out. Now we can move past it.

    Jan 22, 2016

  • Why Data Scientist Is This Year's Hottest Job

    Computerworld | It's notable enough that close to half of the 25 "best jobs in America" named by recruiting site Glassdoor this week are tech-related, but even more striking is the fact that "data scientist" tops the list.

    Jan 21, 2016

  • Pharma Industry Calls on Governments to Fund New Antibiotics

    Phenomena | At the World Economic Forum in Davos, a group of almost 100 pharma companies and trade associations have released a bare bones outline of a plan to spur research into new antibiotics and encourage their responsible use.

    Jan 21, 2016

  • Can Big Genomic Data Reveal the Fundamental Units of the Brain?

    Bio-IT World | An ambitious new study from the Allen Institute for Brain Science illustrates how new methods for isolating and studying single cells, combined with massive RNA sequencing data, are changing the way neuroscientists think about the variety and organization of cells in the brain.

    Jan 20, 2016

  • The Muscular Dystrophy Patient and Olympic Medalist with the Same Genetic Disorder

    ProPublica | David Epstein tells the story of how a woman whose muscles disappeared discovered, through years of dogged research, that she shared a disease with a muscle-bound Olympic athlete.

    Jan 18, 2016

  • NIH Launches Centers for Common Disease Genomics

    Bio-IT World News Brief | With funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, four new Centers for Common Disease Genomics could receive up to $260 million over four years.

    Jan 14, 2016

  • Intellia Therapeutics Forms New Division eXtellia for Joint Programs with Novartis

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Intellia Therapeutics, one of three major companies developing drugs based on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, has announced that its ex vivo programs will now be pursued in a new division of the company called eXtellia Therapeutics.

    Jan 14, 2016

  • Pathway Genomics, IBM Health App

    ZDNet | Pathway Genomics last week announced that the app the company has been developing with IBM Watson is now in closed alpha release.

    Jan 12, 2016

  • Jolly Jay Flatley Ushers in Another Big Year for Illumina

    Bio-IT World | The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference comes but once a year. Now it’s here, now it’s here, and Illumina CEO Jay Flatley has honored his seasonal tradition by releasing a new next-generation sequencer in his address to investors.

    Jan 12, 2016

  • Illumina Spinoff GRAIL to Trial Liquid Biopsies for Early Detection of Cancer

    Bio-IT World | Illumina, the dominant manufacturer of DNA sequencing technology, has formed a spinoff company called GRAIL to experiment with a pan-cancer blood test, an undertaking for which hundreds of thousands of patients may be enrolled in clinical studies.

    Jan 11, 2016

  • You're Probably Not Mostly Microbes

    The Atlantic | A new study revises the most famous "fact" about the microbiome: that microbes outnumber human cells in the body ten to one.

    Jan 8, 2016

  • BioMérieux and Illumina Use Whole Genome Sequencing to Monitor Hospital Infections

    Bio-IT World | In partnership with Illumina, multinational diagnostics company bioMérieux has launched EpiSeq, the first commercial system to monitor outbreaks in hospitals by sequencing and analyzing the whole genomes of bacteria.

    Jan 8, 2016

  • Moderna Signs Deal with Contract Researcher to Bring mRNA Therapies Into Clinical Trials

    FierceBiotech | Moderna Therapeutics, a high-profile private biotech with scores of preclinical projects, is finally moving toward human trials, recruiting one of the world's largest CROs to help get its much-hyped pipeline moving.

    Jan 8, 2016

  • A Precision Medicine Blitz in China

    Nature News | A new push by the Chinese government for research in genomic health is expected to dwarf the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative in both scale and funding, although China's shortage of physicians and drug development capacity may make it hard to capitalize on new discoveries.

    Jan 6, 2016

  • Editas Medicine Files for CRISPR Technology's First IPO

    Bio-IT World | Still facing a looming patent dispute over its most basic intellectual property, Editas Medicine registered with the SEC for an initial public offering this week, making it the first therapeutics company based on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to go public.

    Jan 5, 2016

  • Who Can Host Biology's Big Data?

    Forbes | The National Institutes of Health expects to shortly phase out its funding for the maintenance of databases like Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, leaving the future of these invaluable resources for the life sciences uncertain.

    Jan 4, 2016

  • December News and Product Briefs

    Bio-IT World | The latest products and announcements from around the industry, including the tranSMART Foundation absorbing the OpenBEL project, and an expanded organs-on-chips program at Merck.

    Dec 30, 2015

  • Silicon Valley's Dubious Biotech Investments

    The Verge | Verge Editors Elizabeth Lopatto and Ben Popper discuss high-tech investors' vulnerability to shaky claims in the life sciences.

    Dec 29, 2015

  • The Fuzzy Definition of 'GMO'

    Grist | The tangled history of agricultural technology, and nature's dazzling array of genetic interventions, make it intractably hard to come up with a crisp, consistent meaning for "genetically modified organism."

    Dec 28, 2015

  • Wellcome Trust Introduces Mykrobe Predictor for Genetic Analysis of Antibiotic Resistance

    Bio-IT World | A large team of researchers led by Zamin Iqbal of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics has published a new software tool that rapidly identifies antibiotic-resistant bacteria using DNA data, beginning with studies of Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

    Dec 23, 2015