Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | The advent of single molecule, real-time sequencing, with average read lengths exceeding 12 kb, has allowed scientists to reliably detect structural variation for the first time. These latest studies have shown that previous human genome data sets have dramatically underrepresented the number of structural variants—along with their effect on health and disease.

Bio-IT World | 2017 Best Practices Awards | Maccabi Healthcare System is using Medial EarlySign’s clinical decision support tool to find colon cancer patients among individuals who didn’t go through traditional channels for screening.

Bio-IT World | The National Cancer Institute’s Cooperative Human Tissue Network (CHTN) provides human tissues and fluids from routine procedures to investigators who use human biospecimens in their research. Unlike tissue banks, the CHTN works prospectively with each investigator to tailor specimen acquisition and processing to meet their specific project requirements.

Bio-IT World Brief | Researchers from Human Longevity have published a study in which individual faces and other physical traits were predicted using whole genome sequencing data and machine learning. This work was published in the journal Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences.

Bio-IT World | The HBV field has seen increased attention from industry research in the past few years, influenced by the success of new hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapies. After scientists realized HCV could be cured, they turned their attention to hepatitis B, hoping to develop a cure for it also.

Bio-IT World Brief | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a historic action today making the first gene therapy available in the United States, ushering in a new approach to the treatment of cancer and other serious and life-threatening diseases.