• 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

  • Foundation Medicine, UnitedHealthcare Sign Lung Cancer Profiling Agreement

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Foundation Medicine has signed an agreement with UnitedHealthcare to offer FoundationOne, a comprehensive genomic profiling assay for solid tumors, to patients with metastatic stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

    Dec 22, 2015

  • Triumph of the Public Cloud

    Wired | A decade after the launch of Amazon Web Services, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward the transfer of computing to cloud services.

    Dec 22, 2015

  • 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