By John Russell July 29, 2010 | The Russell Transcript | Is it time for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to relinquish its role as the sole arbiter of drug efficacy and to focus instead on its original

The challenges facing the primary producers of workflow and pipeline software—Accelrys and InforSense—may not be so much with each other as evolving in step with pharma’s needs. By John Russell July 26, 2010 | It’s tempting to paint the commercial workflow

Clinical Trials & Research Winner FDA nominated by GlobalSubmit Project Common Table of Contents By Kevin Davies July 26, 2010 | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t often bask in the spotlight of positive press, which must make

Personalized & Translational Medicine Winner PROOF iCAPTURE Centre of Excellence nominated by IO Informatics Project Semantic Data Integration, Knowledge Building and Sharing Applied to Biomarker Discovery and Patient Screening for Pre symptomatic Heart, Lung or Kidney Failure in Transplantation Medicine

Bio-IT World | In a paper to be published tomorrow in Cell, MIT biologists report the first link between amyloid plaques that form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and a gene previously implicated in the aging process, SIRT1.

Commentary | Pharmaceutical and health care professionals are often faced with mishandled information, fines, and the resulting patient outrage. Fortunately, there are three ways professionals can avoid facing the same situation: Setting the security bar higher, securing data prior to shipment, and obtaining frequent third-party verification.

Bio-IT World | Scientists at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, the former Soviet atomic research center, have sequenced the first Russian genome, that of a middle-aged "ethnically Russian" cancer patient. The work, using both Illumina and Applied Biosystems platforms, was published in a new Russian journal late last year.

Bio-IT World | In what turned out to be his final official engagement as CEO of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Christoph Westphal offered some key lessons in how to build a successful biotech company during a thoroughly engaging keynote at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo last week, and addressed the ongoing controversy over the mechanism behind the Sirtuins.

Bio-IT World | It’s estimated that perhaps half of all drugs brought to market by major biopharmaceutical companies are actually discovered by small-to-midsize players. Working behind scenes to help the latter companies move their molecules forward is small army of consultancies who provide needed expertise or capacity. Indeed, every Big Pharma layoff adds to their ranks.

Bio-IT World  | Iya Khalil is a fast talker, she readily admits. But she’s not afraid to admit that her company, Gene Network Sciences (GNS), has had to pause and change its tune over the past decade in order to establish fruitful business partnerships with pharma. However, the latest version of its supercomputer-based scientific platform called REFS (Reverse Engineering, Forward Simulation) and efforts to harness complete ‘omic and clinical data are putting GNS on the right track.