• Recursion’s Vision for the New Shape of Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | As a “digital native,” Recursion is working to reshape the drug discovery industry—quite literally. Gone is the vision of a traditional discovery funnel, wide at the top and slowly narrowing. Instead, Recursion proposes a drug discovery machine powering a T-shaped funnel where many options are considered, but failure is fast and the candidates that advance have a potentially higher likelihood of being a successful treatment. Easier said than done.

    Nov 17, 2021

  • Unique Repurposing Approach Identifies Potential Alzheimer’s Disease Drug

    Bio-IT World | Trials for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drugs have repeatedly failed with billions of dollars invested. But a new, multidisciplinary drug repurposing model, described in a recent article in Nature Aging, combines drug repurposing with precision medicine, network-based drug targeting, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, and real-world data analysis.

    Nov 16, 2021

  • MemVerge’s Vision for Big Memory Computing

    Bio-IT World | The vision, Charles Fan explains, is big memory. Fan and two other co-founders launched MemVerge, an all-memory storage start-up that Fan calls quite disruptive and high risk—but also the compute architecture of the future.

    Nov 11, 2021

  • What’s Behind Growing Adoption Of Cell-Based Vaccine Platforms

    Bio-IT World | Cell-based vaccines, initially developed to add speed and scale to pandemic response efforts and reduce dependency on chickens in the vaccine manufacturing process, have over the past few years also shown to be more reliably effective than traditional, egg-based products.

    Nov 10, 2021

  • NVIDIA GTC: Networking, Healthcare AI, Modeling and Simulation

    Bio-IT World | At the NVIDIA GTC event, wide ranging announcements covered new networking capabilities, new AI capabilities, and new tools to advance healthcare and life sciences research.

    Nov 9, 2021

  • Genetic Sequencing Will Enable Us To Win The Global Battle Against COVID-19

    Bio-IT World | Using genetic sequencing to identify pathogens and respond to outbreaks is hardly new. The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 was a game-changer, however. While SARS-CoV-2 was identified and sequenced in record time, it proved impossible to contain. It quickly became apparent that existing surveillance systems were not up to the task of tracking a fast-moving virus that spread asymptomatically. The speed and scale of Coronavirus spread provided a wake-up call highlighting our vulnerability to a global pandemic. But bioinformatics plays a crucial role.

    Nov 5, 2021

  • ‘Reverse Vaccination’ Has Broad Clinical Potential As Immunotherapy Strategy

    Bio-IT World | Researchers at the University of Buffalo (UB) have come up with a nanoparticle platform for oral prophylactic immunotherapy designed to pre-expose the immune system to medications it might otherwise perceive as foreign and attack. If translated to the clinic, their novel “reverse vaccination” approach could be used to desensitize patients to key proteins in drug treatments for rare conditions, autoimmune diseases, and allergies.

    Nov 3, 2021

  • Follow the Money: CRISPR, Data Science in Africa, Analytics Cloud

    Bio-IT World | CRISPR partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals, new public biotech fund, life sciences analytics cloud, immune target validation, single cell analysis, and more.

    Nov 2, 2021

  • Broad Optimizes for Google Cloud, Intel and Seven Bridges Population Genomics Tool, More

    Bio-IT World | Pistoia sets new life sciences strategy, Charles River Labs announces cryo-EM partnership, and Vertex and Mammoth launch CRISPR partnership. Plus new products from Waters, PerkinElmer, Thermo Scientific and more.

    Oct 29, 2021

  • Artificial Intelligence Aiding Human Interpretation Of Sequenced Genomes

    Bio-IT World | A “quiet revolution” has been underway over the past year, exponentially growing the number of genetic variants discoverable by genome sequencing, according to Stephen Kingsmore, M.D., president and CEO of Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine in San Diego. Notably, it is now possible to identify an enormous number of structural variants—large genomic alterations that include insertions, deletions, and copy number variations—which account for about 20% of diagnoses in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

    Oct 28, 2021

  • Takeda’s Krista McKee on Shifting the Data Ecosystem

    Bio-IT World | Krista McKee’s 20-year career in pharma has steadily taken her on a trajectory toward data science. She is currently Head of Insights and Analytics at Takeda’s Data Sciences Institute (DSI). She recently sat down to discuss how Takeda is recognizing the importance of data alignment and accessibility and the choreography necessary to keep it all moving forward.

    Oct 26, 2021

  • New Discovery Data Architecture Needed to Support New Modalities

    Bio-IT World | Increasingly, the discovery and development of new medicines is embracing bioactive modalities beyond traditional small molecules, both as therapeutic agents and delivery mechanisms. I propose that the industry create standards that describe not only how experimental and substance data should be treated but also cover the services that provide access to that data.

    Oct 22, 2021

  • UC Berkeley, UCSF Launch Computational Precision Health Program

    Bio-IT World | Funded by an anonymous $50 million gift, the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco yesterday announced a joint program in computational precision health.

    Oct 21, 2021

  • Janssen’s Data Ecosystem and the Role of Data Managers

    Bio-IT World | At the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo last month, Aleksandar Stojmirovic and Weiwei Schultz, both of Janssen’s Data Science group, explained the data management mission and vision of Janssen R&D.

    Oct 20, 2021

  • Novel Peptide Drugs Offer Extended Pain Relief

    Bio-IT World | University at Buffalo (UB) researchers plan to commercialize a platform for site-of-injury pain relief that targets nerve endings, the starting point of pain signaling, using lipidated peptides (peptides modified with lipid molecules) that prevent overexcitement of pain neurons.

    Oct 19, 2021

  • Herophilus Aims To ‘Industrialize’ Use Of Organoids For Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | A San Francisco-based startup is using robotic automation to “industrialize” the organoid and scale up use of the next-generation human in vitro models in drug discovery experiments for brain diseases. The plan is to use these intact systems, inclusive of microglia as well as neurons, to go after genetically complicated diseases and apply machine learning techniques to find connections between the multi-phenotypic data that gets generated.

    Oct 14, 2021

  • Bio-IT World Issues 2022 Innovative Practices Awards Call for Entries

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is accepting entries for the 2022 Innovative Practices Awards competition. The deadline for entry is March 1, 2022, and the $300 application fee will be waived for entrants who meet the early deadline of January 14, 2022.

    Oct 13, 2021

  • Export Of Damaged Mitochondria To The Heart May Explain ‘Obesity Paradox’

    Bio-IT World | Exosomal trafficking from fat to heart cells may help explain the “obesity paradox,” the baffling observation that packing extra pounds can have a beneficial, if short-term, protective effect for patients with heart disease. The cargo being delivered are oxidatively damaged mitochondrial particles that appear to prompt the heart to produce a flood of protective antioxidant molecules, better preparing it to cope with insults that later come along—such as a heart attack.

    Oct 12, 2021

  • Follow the Money: CRISPR, Next-Gen Neuroscience, Protein Platforms

    Bio-IT World | CRISPR unicorn, pan-coronavirus vaccine research, chemical and biological weapons protection for warfighters, new methods for live cell research, seed round for a new drug discovery platform, and more.

    Oct 11, 2021

  • Amazon Genomics CLI is Open Source, UK Biobank’s Research Analysis Platform Live, More

    Bio-IT World | New leadership at JAX, Illumina expands into Latin America, PacBio partners with The European Reference Genome Atlas, UK Biobank’s Research Analysis Platform is now live, and BC Platforms seeks to build the largest integrated clinical and genomics data biobank in Africa. Plus: new products from MemVerge, Quantum, Pure Storage, Sensyne Health, and more.

    Oct 7, 2021