• OrbiMed Launches New VC Fund with $950m

    Bio-IT World News Brief | OrbiMed, a leading investment firm focused on the healthcare sector, today announced the closing of its next venture capital fund, OrbiMed Private Investments VI, LP, with $950 million in limited partner commitments.

    Dec 21, 2015

  • Bayer, CRISPR Therapeutics Form $335M+ Gene Editing Venture

    Xconomy | Bayer and CRISPR Therapeutics have signed a pact that could be worth more than $335 million to develop CRISPR-based drugs for a variety of diseases starting with blindness, blood disorders, and congenital heart disease.

    Dec 21, 2015

  • The Personal Genome Project, Ten Years Later

    Techonomy | A decade ago, the Personal Genome Project became the first massive study of people sharing their full genome information. Many thought it unlikely to succeed.

    Dec 18, 2015

  • Juniper warns about spy code in firewalls

    Computerworld | Juniper, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, said on Thursday it found spying code planted in certain models of its firewalls, an alarming discovery that echoes of state-sponsored tampering.

    Dec 18, 2015

  • AMP, FDA Debate Regulation of Laboratory-Developed Tests

    Bio-IT World | The Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP) accused the Food and Drug Administration of fabricating some of the examples included in a recent FDA report outlining the public health evidence for FDA oversight of laboratory-developed tests.

    Dec 17, 2015

  • Congress Gives Big Funding Increase to NIH

    STAT | The spending bill for the federal government, still pending passage, ends more than 12 years of stagnant budgets for NIH with a $2 billion raise.

    Dec 16, 2015

  • Long-Read Sequencing in the Age of Genomic Medicine

    Diagnostics World | Long-read sequencing today is mostly a curiosity of basic research, but Roche Diagnostics is now planning to commercialize it for clinical testing with a high-throughput instrument launch in 2016. Robert Sebra, Director of Technology Development at Mount Sinai, tells us where he sees the most promise in using long-read sequencing to diagnose and treat patients.

    Dec 16, 2015

  • FDA Brings PrecisionFDA Platform Online

    Bio-IT World News Brief | This morning, the FDA announced the availability of precisionFDA, a platform where developers can upload and access pipelines for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data, comparing results against best-in-class reference standards.

    Dec 15, 2015

  • Personalized Medicine: A Faustian Bargain?

    Scientific American Blog Network | Two specialists in the ethics and policy of biotechnology argue that personalized medicine is in danger of denying state-of-the-art care to the very data donors who make new discoveries possible.

    Dec 14, 2015

  • AstraZeneca Joins a $100M Research Effort to Investigate the 'Secretome'

    FierceBiotech | AstraZeneca, on the hunt for new drug targets and delivery mechanisms, is teaming up with the Swedish Wallenberg Centre for Protein Research to explore the universe of proteins secreted by human cells.

    Dec 11, 2015

  • Rubius Snags $25M to Engineer Red Blood Cells Into Drugs

    Forbes | Flagship Ventures-funded Rubius Therapeutics wants to insert genes for therapeutic enzymes into blood-forming stem cells, then infuse the nucleus-free mature cells into patients to fight disease.

    Dec 10, 2015

  • CRISPR Design Company Desktop Genetics Gets Boost from Illumina

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Illumina has made an investment in Desktop Genetics, a company that provides software for the design of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing complexes.

    Dec 10, 2015

  • sbv IMPROVER Launches Fourth Systems Toxicology Challenge

    Bio-IT World Brief | sbv IMPROVER, an international scientific crowdsourcing initiative, has launched the Systems Toxicology Computational Challenge. The challenge, which is open to anyone working in computational science who is developing predictive modelling techniques, provides the unique opportunity for participants to vigorously and objectively test their methodologies. Working on blood gene expression data, participants are being challenged to derive a predictive model to distinguish current smokers from either non-smokers or former-smokers. Entries will be scored by an independent panel against a gold-standard dataset.

    Dec 10, 2015

  • Silicon Mechanics Opens Education Cluster Grant Program

    Bio-IT World | Silicon Mechanics has opened its 5th Annual Research Cluster Grant (RCG) program. Two institutions will be selected, and both will be awarded a complete high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. The competition is open to all United States and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations.

    Dec 9, 2015

  • Citizen Sequencers: Taking Oxford Nanopore's MinION to the Classroom and Beyond

    Bio-IT World | With its cheap, handheld MinION sequencers, Oxford Nanopore is looking to early adopters like Karen James to help them reach teachers and citizen scientists ready to bring DNA sequencing outside the research lab.

    Dec 9, 2015

  • GNS Healthcare Announces $10M Financing, MMRF Study Results

    Bio-IT World | GNS Healthcare announced a $10M Series C financing round today. Earlier this week, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) announced preliminary results of a multi-year collaboration with GNS to speed the discovery of innovative treatments for patients with multiple myeloma. 

    Dec 8, 2015

  • Googles Life Sciences division is now called Verily

    Computerworld | Google's parent company, Alphabet, has renamed its life sciences division Verily and given it the goal to "understand disease at the individual level."

    Dec 8, 2015

  • Roche and SQZ Biotech Pair Up on Immuno-Oncology

    FierceBiotech | Roche will invest as much as $500 million in a partnership with SQZ, based on a technology that physically manipulates immune cells to admit new antigens, with the aim of training these cells to fight a patient's own cancer.

    Dec 7, 2015

  • 'Kill Switches' for Genetically Modified Microbes

    Wired | Biologists at MIT have engineered new genetic elements to insert in bacteria, making these microbes dependent on lab-supplied synthetic molecules to survive.

    Dec 7, 2015

  • Should DNA donors see their genomic data?

    Nature News & Comment | Geneticist Charles Danko turned to Twitter this week for help in convincing his IRB at Cornell that he should be allowed to let his study participants download their genetic information

    Dec 4, 2015