May 23 | Bio-IT World | STANFORD, CA—The challenge in healthcare is to change what is—and what isn’t—a billable question, said 23andMe founder Ann Wojicicki, giving the opening keynote yesterday at the Big Data in Biomedicine conference at Stanford University. And they key will be generating so much data that we’re forced to figure it out.
May 23 | Computerworld | An survey of 30 countries finds the US to be the least risky place to open a data center, followed by the UK, Germany and Sweden. The most risky spots were Indonesia, India, and Brazil.
May 23 | InformationWeek | PatientsLikeMe has launched its Open Research Exchange and issued a call for patients, an initiative funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant announced earlier this year.
May 22 | Bio-IT World | With the plummeting cost of next-generation sequencing (NGS) expanding the range of clinical genomics tests being offered by diagnostics companies and medical centers, a looming problem lies in reimbursement.
May 21 | New York Times | Angelina Jolie announced drastic action this week--a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she carries a faulty copy of BRCA1. But this type of action isn't available to all women, thanks to the high costs of gene tests.
May 20 | In the Pipeline | Derek Lowe breaks down how much various companies and sectors spend on R&D. The big spenders? Drug discovery and semiconductor companies.
May 20 | ReadWrite Cloud | ReadWrite tests the speed of the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services: Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
May 17 | HPC Wire | Horst Simon believes we won’t be achieving exascale computing any time soon.
May 16 | Forbes | Bristol-Myers Squibb's approved drug, Yervoy, is being tested in combination with several experimental drugs to treat advanced melanoma.
May 16 | Wall Street Journal | The diagnostics market is its most attractive since 2007, and health care is the best performing sector of the public market right now.
May 15 | Opinionmics | If you want to talk about the cost of sequencing--how it's going down and by how much, Mick Watson has plotted it all out.
May 15 | MendelsPod | Complete Genomics CEO, Cliff Reid, talks about the future after BGI’s buyout.
May 15 | Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | I get to have the most fun when someone wants to collaborate on a crazy idea. But crazy ideas come with unexpected challenges, too. Our paper on how dispensing methods affect datasets was published in PLOS ONE a week ago, and we would not have predicted the polarizing effect it has had.
May 14 | Boston.com | GNS Healthcare's Colin Hill has been around for a while. But now is time for big data in personalized medicine, he says.
May 14 | Yale News | Yale researchers scanned the genomes of 1800 individuals and found that 10% of congenital heart disease is due to de novo mutations, not found in affected newborn's parents.
May 13 | Bio-IT World | First Base | I received an email alert over the weekend with the following title: "Kevin Davies Reflects on Emotional Goodbye." The story was about a professional soccer player in the UK leaving the club he had captained and served for ten years. Coincidentally, I'm also doing a spot of reflection, for this is my last First Base editor's column for Bio-IT World.
May 10 | Nature News | When Yaniv Erlich published his work in Science identifying members of the 1000 Genomes Project, even he was surprised at how easy it was. “When he first saw the results, Erlich said later, he was so shocked at how easily the method worked that he had to go outside and take a walk,” Nature News reports.
May 10 | e Science News | Salk Institute of Biological Sciences finds epigenetic markers influence stem cells in human development. By studying various epigenetic influences, researchers examined the beginning states of cells before they differentiated.
May 10 | Huffington Post | What does the sequestration mean for science? One researcher says it will mean an exodus from science for young scientists as National Institute of Health grants are denied and top talent can’t find work—the ultimate brain drain.
May 10 | Bio-IT World | Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research is getting a major boost from a newly launched Pooled Resource Open-access ALS Clinical Trials (PRO-ACT) platform, which has amassed more than 8,500 de-identified clinical patient records into a single, harmonized dataset. Multiple pharmaceutical companies are now actively exploring PRO-ACT, seeking ways to streamline clinical trials and develop better treatments for the rare and highly heterogeneous disease more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.