• Pistoia Alliance Plans Microbiome Atlas

    Bio-IT World | The Pistoia Alliance launched a new project on the microbiome yesterday, which could help speed up the advancement of new, precision medicines and treatments. The project is funded by Bayer, BMS, Eagle Genomics, Pfizer, Roche and Takeda and aims to incorporate microbiome data into the drug development pipeline by gathering all existing microbiome data to create a global standardized ‘atlas’ that scientists can refer to when choosing new drug candidates.

    Feb 17, 2022

  • NIH Sleep Research Plan Highlights Women’s Health, Reducing Disparities

    Bio-IT World | In December the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released the latest version if its Sleep Research Plan that used a crowdsourcing campaign to ensure all willing voices on the topic were captured. The congressionally-mandated plan, the fourth in a series published since 1996, seeks to draw the attention of investigators to high-priority areas that could “make an impact within the next five to 10 years,” according to Marishka K. Brown, Ph.D., director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR).

    Feb 15, 2022

  • GIAB Establishes New Benchmark for Several Medically Relevant, Difficult-to-Sequence Genes

    Bio-IT World |The Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) Consortium has just reported a new, expanded benchmark for 273 medically relevant genes that are challenging to clinically assess with current sequencing methods. The work is published in Nature Biotechnology.

    Feb 14, 2022

  • ‘Immune Archetypes’ Of Cancer Could Help Tailor Treatments To Tumors

    Bio-IT World | Immunotherapies vary widely in their ability to effectively treat patients with cancer, and the reason is the differing immune states of their tumor. Only a finite number of “immune archetypes” exist across all cancers—and these distinct environments are inhabited by more than the T cells targeted by currently marketed immunotherapy drugs.

    Feb 10, 2022

  • Releasing the Potential of Biobatteries

    Bio-IT World | Imagine batteries made from completely safe, organic, non-combustible, and biodegradable materials. Now imagine that these batteries can be recharged not from an outlet, but from the excess energy of our bodies. Refueling by gathering kinetic energy from our movement, or thermal energy from body heat, or—in what might be the most sci-fi scenario—feeding on the biochemical surplus of sugars coursing through our veins, or even compounds present in our saliva, sweat, or other body fluids. This idea is the biobattery, and the potential uses and benefits are pretty remarkable.

    Feb 9, 2022

  • Follow the Money: AI in Gastroenterology Research, Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning

    Bio-IT World | Sanofi and Exscientia collaborate to use AI for oncology and immunology treatments, Iterative Scopes using AI in gastroenterology treatments, Quris uses AI for clinical prediction, and more.

    Feb 8, 2022

  • Driving Value in Biopharma R&D through Digital Transformation

    Bio-IT World | Rapid scientific innovation is dependent on streamlining three key capabilities: improving data usability, enabling global cross-team collaboration, and automating scientific workflows. We believe that digital technologies should serve as the foundation that connects your data, people, and processes together to drive scientific discovery. From our perspective, the companies that embrace digital will ultimately win the R&D race.

    Feb 4, 2022

  • New Collaborations to Address Skin Care, Gastrointestinal Disease, MS, Whole-Cell Models, Spatial Genomics

    Bio-IT World | Skin health, particle-scale whole-cell models with NVIDIA, single-cell spatial genomics, diabetic kidney disease. Plus: AI in MS, inflammatory bowel disease, clinical trials, and genomic searches, and more.

    Feb 2, 2022

  • Novel CAR T Cells Give Cancer A One-Two Punch

    Bio-IT World | In an entirely new direction for immunotherapy, researchers at the Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI) have genetically engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to produce potentially synergistic, small-molecule drugs that can penetrate a solid tumor.

    Feb 1, 2022

  • Illumina, Invitae Founding Members of ASHG’s Genetics and Genomics Impact Partnerships Program

    Bio-IT World | The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) today announced the launch of the ASHG Genetics and Genomics Impact Partnerships program. Illumina, a leader in next-generation genomic sequencing technologies, and Invitae, a leading medical genetics company, have joined as founding partners.

    Jan 31, 2022

  • Predicting COVID-19 Severity: Researchers Look to Fill Diagnostic Gap, Match Patients with Treatments

    Bio-IT World | Researchers at Mount Sinai and the University of Colorado are pursuing the possibilities that stem from predicting which COVID-19 patients are most likely to deteriorate over time. The hope is that this ability could help health care professionals more effectively triage patients and pair them with appropriate treatments to improve outcomes.

    Jan 27, 2022

  • Data Contributors Wield Control In AI-Powered Longevity Research Network

    Bio-IT World | Efforts are underway to create an economy of data contributors and researchers who want to retain ownership of their contribution to longevity research as well as a proportionate share of the downstream profits from any resulting products. The ecosystem, and tokens underpinning it, goes by the name of Rejuve—definitionally, “the process of making somebody young again.”

    Jan 26, 2022

  • Canadian Brain Institute Opens Data Sharing on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, More

    Bio-IT World | After a decade of methodical preparation, Canada’s Ontario Brain Institute's (OBI) neuroinformatics platform, Brain-CODE, launched its open data sharing feature for global brain disorder research.

    Jan 25, 2022

  • The Role Of Bioinformatics In Bringing Biobanks To The Forefront Of Scientific Breakthroughs

    Bio-IT World | Life science researchers and drug discovery scientists today work in what, in my view, will be remembered in the future as the beginning of a “golden era” where the power of genetic information is connected to a wide range of other healthcare and lifestyle data to support better understanding of disease etiology, as well as the identification of candidates for drug targets and the discovery of new biomarkers that can be used to predict the presence or future development of a disease in an individual patient.

    Jan 21, 2022

  • Human Proteoform Project Could Be Biology’s Next Moonshot

    Bio-IT World | The nonprofit Consortium for Top-Down Proteomics recently proposed the Human Proteoform Project to generate a definitive reference set of the proteoforms produced from the genome. This will become a “seminal moment in science,” Neil Kelleher says, and the initiative is the next obvious step now that the Human Genome Project has provided the blueprint for how proteins get made.

    Jan 19, 2022

  • Applying AI to Real-World Data to Improve Pharmaceutical Development

    Bio-IT World | Trends from the Trenches —Xiong Sean Liu is a Director at Novartis where he has been working to make inroads for AI in pharma. In Liu’s view, AI as a technology is already successful, but he also believes it is still in its early days for healthcare and there are still significant challenges for use. Data organization, for example, must be solved so that AI models can be put to best use. Liu and his team recently explored how electronic health records could be better populated and curated to facilitate clinical trials.

    Jan 18, 2022

  • PacBio Plugs Partnerships, Accuracy at JP Morgan

    Bio-IT World | Closing out the genomic presentations at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Christian Henry, president and CEO of Pacific Biosciences, had the dual challenges of presenting PacBio’s year and future strategies as well as answering claims and announcements other companies made. He persevered.

    Jan 14, 2022

  • Antibodies, Easy Single-Cell, Genomics for All: Notes from the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference

    Bio-IT World | At the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference—being held virtually again this year—pharma and biotech companies gave overviews of their 2021 business and their views of the future. Here are the highlights we noted from presentations from Regeneron, 10X Genomics, and Invitae

    Jan 13, 2022

  • Seqster, National Pancreas Foundation, Launch Pancreatic Disease Patient Registry

    Bio-IT World | Seqster announced today a multi-year partnership with The National Pancreas Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides hope for those suffering from pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer, to create the country’s largest, most inclusive pancreatic disease patient registry. The registry uses Seqster technology to connect to any EHR, genomic DNA test, and wearable/remote monitoring device, providing patients with a complete longitudinal health record in real-time.

    Jan 11, 2022

  • Illumina Teases New Chemistry, Long Reads, Oncology, Proteomics Partnerships

    Bio-IT World | At the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference—being held virtually again this year—Illumina CEO Francis deSouza outlined Illumina’s record for 2021, announced several new partnerships, and teased new chemistry and new long read technologies.

    Jan 11, 2022