• How Digital Chemistry Will Improve Cross-Functional Collaboration In The Biopharma Industry

    Bio-IT World | Digital chemistry is the term given to recent developments in using digital control and big data approaches for designing molecules, optimizing and controlling chemical reactions, and performing complex chemical processes under digital control with sensor feedback. A fundamental development in digital chemistry is the evolution of the concept of chemputation, which allows chemical reactions to be easily done robotically using a general purpose programming language for chemical synthesis.

    Nov 22, 2024

  • ‘Secret Shares’ of Patient Health Data Enable Secure Multiparty Research

    Bio-IT World | Scientists in Europe collaborated on the first international-level clinical study using secure multiparty computation (MPC), which enabled cross-border cooperation without sharing any personalized health data. The cryptographic method traces back to the late 1970s but has been “severely underused” up until now because it’s computationally complex and few data security experts are familiar with the technology.

    Nov 20, 2024

  • Recursion, Novo Nordisk Release New Chemistry Foundation Model

    Bio-IT World | In a paper published last week in Nature Communications, teams from Recursion and Novo Nordisk created a new foundation model for chemistry called MolE. Benchmarked for absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) using the Therapeutic Data Commons, MolE outperformed previous models.

    Nov 19, 2024

  • Much Like a Crime Scene, Cancer’s Evolution Can be Reconstructed

    Bio-IT World | Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine have combined several powerful technologies to reconstruct how cancer spreads from the prostate to metastatic sites elsewhere in the body. Bioluminescence imaging, CRISPR/Cas9-based barcoding, and innovative computational methods for tracing the movement of cancer from tissue to tissue were used in creating a roadmap revealing the small number of aggressive cells that seed cancer’s often deadly migration.

    Nov 14, 2024

  • Blueprint of the Human Spliceosome Could Help Find Cancer’s Achilles’ Heel

    Bio-IT World | The spliceosome, the cellular machinery that catalyzes the process of splicing in genes, was discovered nearly five decades ago and has been successfully leveraged in the development of therapies for rare diseases such as spinal muscular dystrophy where concerns about side effects tend to be secondary to correcting the underlying pathology. The question now is how to move the strategy to more complex diseases involving more than a single gene and splicing mutation.

    Nov 13, 2024

  • New Diagnostic Tool for Identifying the Effects of Antifibrotic Therapy in Breast Cancer

    Bio-IT World | In recent research, scientists at the University of Arizona have developed a diagnostic tool, the MeCo Score, which evaluates metastatic risk in early-stage breast cancer by analyzing how cancer cells respond to the stiffness of surrounding tissue. This tool leverages RNA sequencing data from tumor samples to identify a "mechanical conditioning" (MeCo) signature, giving insights into cancer cell adaptations within the tumor microenvironment.

    Nov 12, 2024

  • Foundations for Change: A Framework for Transforming R&D Outcomes With AI

    Bio-IT World | For AI and data-driven drug discovery to have a tangible impact on R&D success, a change in the culture is as important as any investment at a data, model, and validation level. Until quite recently, the perceived value of AI in drug discovery and development failed to match the hype.

    Nov 8, 2024

  • PacBio’s Pink Desktop Platform, $500 Genome Chemistry

    Bio-IT World | This week at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting, Pacific Biosciences unveiled both its new SPRQ chemistry—pronounced “spark”— and its newest sequencing platform, Vega, a desktop, long-read sequencer with all the compute on board. Also it’s pink.

    Nov 7, 2024

  • New Data Suggests a More Expansive View of Heart Health Lipids

    Bio-IT World | The traditional LDL and HDL cholesterol tests may soon be obsolete as new research suggests they provide an incomplete view of heart health compared to other lipid molecules circulating in the blood. This shift stems from a recent study led by Dr. Cristina Legido-Quigley, a systems medicine expert at King’s College London and Steno Diabetes Centre, which analyzed lipids in children with obesity.

    Nov 4, 2024

  • AI Points to Drug Repurposing Opportunities for Diseases Without Cures

    Bio-IT World | Harvard scientists have succeeded in using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify promising drug candidates for diseases for which there are no examples of successful treatment. The graph foundation model, known as TxGNN, opens untold opportunities to repurpose drugs for the thousands of diseases afflicting small populations and exacting a huge toll in terms of both economics and human suffering.

    Oct 31, 2024

  • New 10x Instruments, Merck Acquires Modifi Biosciences, New Immunogenicity Bioanalysis Features, Partnerships, More

    Bio-IT World | Modifi Biosciences has been acquired by Merck; Sapio Sciences announces the addition of new immunogenicity bioanalysis features to its industry-leading lab informatics platform; and more.

    Oct 30, 2024

  • Follow the Money: Small Molecule Solutions AI Platform, MIT, Basecamp Research Collaboration, More

    Bio-IT World | Terray Therapeutics will enhance their integrated AI platform, tNova, which identifies and optimizes novel small molecule solutions to the most complex problems; Basecamp Research, in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, plans to advance their data collection and strengthen their AI capabilities; and more.

    Oct 29, 2024

  • AI Is Nothing Without An AI-Ready Data Strategy

    Bio-IT World | Applied artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming drug discovery research and development, accelerating the journey from lab to lifesaving therapies, and both the reality and the hype are very well known. Less obvious—almost 90% of the iceberg—is the critical role played by data.

    Oct 25, 2024

  • Cleveland Clinic Researchers Find Hope in Immune Cells’ Reaction to Immunotherapy

    Bio-IT World | There is much we still don’t know about the relationship between immune cells and cancer cells and how they interact and influence each other over the course of immune activating cancer therapies. Researchers at Cleveland Clinic are exploring these relationships and reported their results last month in Nature Medicine.

    Oct 23, 2024

  • Illumina’s New Desktop Sequencing Series Is Fast, Cheap, Simple

    Bio-IT World | Illumina unveiled its MiSeq i100 Series of sequencing systems last week during an online customer event, comprising two new benchtop instruments: MiSeq i100 and MiSeq i100 Plus Systems. The MiSeq i100 will be available to ship globally in 2025.

    Oct 17, 2024

  • Pistoia Alliance Research Finds Concerns on Security, Barriers, More

    Bio-IT World | As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become increasingly prevalent in the industry, there are still several concerns about its implementation. Mainly, how safe is it to use AI? What measures can be taken to increase and reinforce security? The Pistoia Alliance decided to find out.

    Oct 16, 2024

  • ‘Heretical’ Idea for Treating Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Moves Forward

    Bio-IT World | The clinical utility of treating cancer by modulating the estrogen receptor could radically and quickly expand, initially for patients with triple-negative breast cancer but potentially thereafter to those with melanoma and cancers found in the colon, lung, head, and neck. Hope springs from findings emerging from the lab of Professor Donald McDonnell, Ph.D., at Duke University School of Medicine, where the field of oral selective estrogen down-regulators was pioneered nearly two decades ago.

    Oct 15, 2024

  • Building Digital Architecture to Reach New Heights: Data and Knowledge Management for Pharma 4.0

    Bio-IT World | In early 2024, it was revealed that contract research and manufacturing organization WuXi Apptec had allegedly shared intellectual property with the Chinese government without their client’s consent. This breach of trust generated widespread concern and backlash, bringing renewed attention to the importance of proper data management and data sharing in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

    Oct 11, 2024

  • New Tool Helps Query Databases, Flag Anomalies in Data

    Bio-IT World | In a data science paper published in June, a team of researchers at MIT presents GenSQL, a system to ease answering data science questions. They published the work in Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. GenSQL is available open source in Clojure on GitHub.

    Oct 8, 2024

  • New Techniques Make RNA Accessible to Study Variants of Uncertain Significance

    Bio-IT World | New work from Dr. Lachlan Jolly and the University of Adelaide’s Neurobiology Research Group is using cutting-edge RNA-based techniques to resolve genetic variants of uncertain significance (VUS) that can't be diagnosed through traditional methods. Many disease-causing genes do not express RNA in accessible tissues like blood or skin, leaving many patients without a clear diagnosis. To overcome this, the team is utilizing two innovative methods—transactivation and transdifferentiation.

    Oct 3, 2024