November and December News and Product Briefs
News Briefs
Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Boston Children’s Hospital published a study in Genetics in Medicine exploring new parents’ attitudes toward newborn genomic testing. The majority of the 514 parents surveyed were interested in newborn genomic testing after receiving a brief orientation to the genome and its impacts on human health, with 82.7 percent of parents saying they were somewhat, very, or extremely interested. Parents who had experienced concerns about the health of their newborn, however, were less likely to be interested in genomic testing. The study was also the first to survey parents separately, finding that most couples were in agreement about their level of interest in newborn genomic testing. Press release
Claritas Genomics selected NextCODE Health’s integrated clinical and research platform, Clinical Sequence Analyzer, to speed the delivery of genetic test results for its pediatric testing business. Using NextCODE’s unique database architecture, Claritas plans to build a centralized, cloud-based variant database to help solve the toughest cases and discover new disease genes. Claritas and its researchers have developed over a hundred tests for single genes associated with pediatric disorders as well as dynamic whole exome-based tests, all of which have been integrated directly into NextCODE’s clinical interface. Press release
Members of the CollabRx scientific team, in collaboration with clinical researchers and physicians at a variety of cancer centers and universities, published a clinical decision support model for oncology in the open-access journal Oncoscience. The publication provides a framework for cancer treatment decisions based on the results of genetic testing. While treatment guidelines already exist for genetic mutations in a small number of genes and cancer types, physicians have no such guidelines for the vast majority of mutations that can be detected using broad next generation sequencing panels. The new framework seeks to help physicians prioritize among mutations, and offer a clinical rationale for treating a patient with relevant FDA-approved or investigational drugs when potentially actionable mutations are found. Press release
Eagle Genomics, a bioinformatics company working with large-scale genomics data, signed a four-year agreement with Procter & Gamble (P&G) to fully deploy Eagle’s bioinformatics software platform, eaglecore, which allows users to integrate, tag and reference all of their research data in a single place. P&G’s Global Biotechnology and Life Sciences Department will use eaglecore in new products R&D, to organize their existing data, and to integrate legacy data with more recent data for analysis across the company. Press release
QIAGEN entered into a master collaboration agreement with Novartis AG to develop and commercialize companion diagnostics paired with Novartis therapeutics. The agreement can cover all QIAGEN platforms, indications or biomarkers. The collaboration with Novartis is the ninth master framework agreement reached by QIAGEN for the development of companion diagnostics, allowing the company to pursue more than 20 collaborative projects with pharma and biotech companies to develop, validate and market companion diagnostics designed to guide the treatment of cancers and other diseases. Press release
BIND Therapeutics, a clinical-stage nanomedicine platform company, entered into a joint research and development agreement with Merck, to discover and develop nanomedicines for oncology. This collaboration will use BIND’s proprietary nanomedicine technology, Accurins, to create targeted treatments based on Merck’s preclinical oncology portfolio, beginning with two Merck compounds associated with regulation of cellular mitosis. BIND will fund and conduct research and development activities to advance Accurin product candidates based on these agents through first-in-human clinical studies, after which either company may choose to sponsor further clinical trials. Press release
Riffyn raised $1.8 million in a Seed financing round led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, with additional investments from Bioeconomy Capital and others. Riffyn is a startup providing experimental process design and analytics software to improve reproducibility and tech transfer in life science, chemical and materials research and development. The core of Riffyn’s product is a data acquisition and analytics engine to deliver scientific insights by exposing trends and causal relationships between experimental variables. The company will use its Seed funding to advance its product to beta release in summer 2015 and commercial launch in late 2015. Press release
Appistry, a developer of tools, software, and services for the use of genomics in medicine, opened applications for the Appistry Fellowship in Life Science Informatics and Entrepreneurship. The two-year fellowship will provide recent college graduates with hands-on, real-world experience developing solutions for analyzing and managing “omics” data. Fellows will participate directly in the design and development of new software tools, and will present their work in oral or scientific posters and in peer-reviewed publications. The fellowship provides a $53,000 stipend over two years, along with health insurance benefits from Appistry. Press release
New Products
Definiens announced the newest version of its image analysis software for quantitative digital pathology, Tissue Studio 4.0. The new release adds the ability to use any chromogen for single and dual stain immunohistochemistry (IHC) quantification. By providing morphological fingerprints and biomarker expression profiles on a cell-by-cell basis, Tissue Studio produces consistent data across samples for any tissue-based assay, while accounting for biological variation and staining heterogeneity. For more on Definiens’ use of image analysis in developing diagnostics and prognostics, see “Definiens Brings Big Data to the Tissue.” Press release
Certara, a drug development and drug safety consultancy, launched version 1.4 of its Phoenix product family. Phoenix is a PK/PD software platform used by more than 5,000 biopharmaceutical companies, veterinary and academic researchers, and regulatory agencies to analyze, manage, report and validate pre-clinical and clinical PK, PD and toxicokinetic (TK) data. Key upgrades in Phoenix 1.4 include a new user interface to automate sequential PK/PD analysis in Phoenix NLME; use of dynamic memory allocation in Phoenix NLME that will vastly reduce memory demands; and a Watson LIMS plug-in within Phoenix Connect to connect to the widely-used Watson LIMS database. Press release
AB SCIEX introduced DiscoveryQuant 3.0 Software, a new version of its ADME software designed to significantly reduce LC/MS method development and optimization time for high-throughput drug discovery laboratories in both small molecules and biotherapeutics. DiscoveryQuant 3.0 Software offers a fully automated workflow to optimize hundreds of compounds, a searchable database of compound history for optimization and chromatography development, and support for AB SCIEX’s TOF mass spectrometry system to continue acquisition of quantitative data and mine for other information simultaneously. Press release
Panasas released SiteSync, a high-speed, parallel replication and file transfer solution for moving massive data sets across the LAN. Designed for use with the Panasas ActiveStor hybrid storage appliance, SiteSync can replicate data up to ten times faster than conventional file transfer utilities. It also provides fast parallel data migration and synchronization for disaster recovery, disk-to-disk backup and remote archive applications. Press release
Tute Genomics added its genome annotation and interpretation platform to BaseSpace, Illumina’s dedicated applications store and informatics community for genomic analysis. Tute provides users with an interface to aid in identification and prioritization of functionally significant genetic variants. Tute’s variant annotations incorporate more than 150 annotation sources including conservation scores, functional predictions, disease databases, and allele frequencies. Users of the platform can generate reports, apply variant filters, and perform family-based, case-control and tumor-normal analyses. Press release
Advanced Biological Laboratories added two new DeepChek applications to BaseSpace, Illumina’s dedicated applications store and cloud-based informatics community. The two research use only mapping tools are used for next-generation sequencing analysis of Hepatitis B and C. Using the apps, researchers can track viral populations and identify changes within genomes, as well as the expression of dual infections and co-infection. Press release
SeekQuence, a startup company focused on experimental design and targeted business intelligence, emerged from stealth mode to release a search portal, SeekProducts, for life science researchers. SeekProducts helps researchers to identify reagents, tools, and devices to expedite experimental design. In its initial release the focus is on antibody products, but additional product groups are planned for early release. Users can search for products based on published and validated applications, search and filter reagents, tools, or devices based on supplier information, directly compare products of interest head-to-head, and link directly to supplier pages to purchase a product. Press release