April News and Product Briefs
April 28, 2014 | Industry news and product releases from the past month:
News Briefs
Definiens signed an agreement with INSERM Transfert to sponsor the worldwide consortium for the validation of the Immunoscore, a new approach to cancer therapy. Under an international task force led by the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), the Immunoscore is being validated by leading immunologists and pathologists in 15 countries. Clinical data suggests that patients with a strong Immunoscore have a better prognosis and that immune response may be a better indicator of risk for reoccurrence than standard tumor staining. Definiens, which Clinical Informatics News recently profiled, has developed the underlying technology, enabling the accurate and reproducible quantification of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes that is essential to the Immunoscore test. Press release
Syapse announced a partnership to make N-of-One’s oncology clinical interpretation available to hospitals and laboratories through interfaces in the Syapse medical data platform. The partnership will provide clinicians the ability to integrate molecular interpretation information directly into their workflow. Using the Syapse platform, hospitals and laboratories will be able to access N-of-One’s interpretation as well as other sources of omics data to build unified molecular profiles for patients. Press release
GE Healthcare acquired CHCA Computer Systems Inc., an operating room management and analytics solutions provider. CHCA develops the Opera software application, which has helped increase productivity and patient satisfaction in the operating room by providing real-time data to support the decision making and management of surgical procedures. This is GE’s second healthcare acquisition in software this year, following the acquisition of API Healthcare. Press release
Rockland Immunochemicals Inc. created a new annual award to be given to promising young scientists. The Joy Cappel 2014 Young Investigator Award, honoring Joy Cappel, President and CEO for over thirty years, is intended to help young investigators establish themselves in the areas of oncology, nuclear signaling, developmental biology, epigenetics, immunology, microbiology, neuroscience, signal transduction or stem cell technology. For each of the next ten years, Rockland is awarding $100,000 in total to 25 qualified candidates. Selected scientists will work hand-in-hand with Rockland professionals to initiate polyclonal antibody development activities. Rockland congratulates the first three Young Investigators chosen for the award: Parham Ramezani-Rad, Christopher Oberley, and Dr. Feng He. Award page
Quanticate was recognized as a category winner in all five of the 2014 Life Science Leader CRO Leadership Awards in Quality, Reliability, Productivity, Regulatory and Innovation. The CRO Leadership Awards were presented by Life Science Leader magazine to help pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies vet potential CRO partners. Press release
Atlantic Research Group, a CRO, has implemented Comprehend Clinical for clinical data insights. A cloud-based platform that generates analytics, dashboards, visualization and reporting from any data source, Comprehend Clinical is being used to measure staff quality and productivity and power a metrics-based incentive program. Atlantic Research Group has reported a measurable reduction in the number and difficulty of sponsors’ support requests. Press release
New Products
Panasas has released PanFS 5.5, the first scale-out NAS solution for technical computing with enterprise-grade Microsoft support. “Windows support is not an easy thing to do… there are a lot of different pieces here that have to be done exactly right if you want to have the sort of experience that an enterprise customer will have,” Geoffrey Noer, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, told Bio-IT World. “What Panasas has done—and this took us the better part of two years to accomplish!—is to re-implement our basic security and user authentication in the file system and completely replace the open source protocol, and replace it with a commercially licensed version of the Microsoft Windows protocol.” The resulting solution is capable of integrating into the Linux environment with extremely high performance, but also allows researchers to connect from a Windows workstation. This is particularly important in NGS environments, Noer said, as many researchers interact with sequencers in a Windows environment, even if later data analysis is done in a Linux environment. The optimizations come with performance enhancements (2x faster Windows access) and new security features as well. PanFS 5.5 is now shipping with all new Panasas storage products and is available as a free upgrade for all ActiveStor 11, 12, and 14 products under current support and maintenance agreements. Press release
Accelrys made available two new mobile applications supporting life sciences workflows and real-time collaboration spanning both the ScienceCloud workspace and on-premises systems. ScienceCloud, as covered recently in Bio-IT World, is a secure, SaaS-based, mobile-enabled information management and collaboration environment for globally networked researchers. Bi-directional integration between ScienceCloud and existing on-premises systems lets life sciences organizations migrate to the cloud in a measured fashion. Press release
QIAGEN announced two product launches to address workflow challenges in next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications. The QIAxpert instrument accelerates quantification and quality control of DNA and RNA samples for next-generation sequencing (NGS), while the CLC Cancer Research Workbench is the first complete bioinformatics software suite for analysis, visualization, and interpretation of advanced NGS data in cancer research. The CLC Cancer Research Workbench also enables all results to be filtered and compared with relevant databases like COSMIC, ClinVar, or in-house curated datasets. Press release
Life Technologies released the Oncomine NGS RNA-Seq Gene Expression Browser, to assess the frequency of molecular events across thousands of samples from the Oncomine NGS collection, including tumor datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The new Oncomine Browser compiles the largest existing set of quality tumor RNA-Seq transcriptome expression data from publicly available sources. The Browser allows researchers to identify potential cancer driver mutations through a web-based application. Product page
The iRODS Consortium announced the release of iRODS 4.0, a production-oriented version of the iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data management platform. iRODS is a configurable, open source technology used in production sites around the world for data management, sharing and integration. Key features of the new iRODS release include a plugin architecture, which enables customization of iRODS installations without recompiling the core code. Press release
The Thermo Scientific HAAKE Viscotester iQ is an intelligent rheometer that adapts to an individual’s measurement routines and conditions. The rheometer’s ‘’Connect Assist’’ function automatically detects the measuring geometry and temperature module, providing real-time feedback to help customers set up sample testing procedures with minimal errors. Product page