Bio-IT World Brief | Seven Bridges today announced that it has been selected by the NIH to support the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase. The Data Commons Pilot Phase is NIH’s latest effort to accelerate biomedical research through informatics. Seven Bridges will lead a team consisting of Repositive, Elsevier, and the Boston Veterans Affair Research Institute. Together, they are forming a private-public consortium called FAIR4CURES.

Bio-IT World | Vanderbilt University has been biobanking patient specimens since 2007 when Josh Denny launched BioVU. Today, the biobank has nearly 250,000 samples, some of which have associated medical records dating back to the early 1980s. Josh Denny, who leads the All of Us Research Program Data and Research Center, hopes the Precision Medicine Initiative will empower the same kind of studies.

Bio-IT World | Since the onset of targeted drug discovery, a little before the turn of the millennium, intracellular drug targets have primarily been enzymes that catalyze reactions. However, a new type of intracellular drug target—Protein-Protein Interactions—are now expanding the space in which to search for new types of medicines.

Bio-IT World | October featured exciting new, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community from innovating companies, organizations, and universities, including 23andMe, Veeva Systems, Edico Genome, and more.

Bio-IT World | The 9^th annual Leaders in Biobanking Congress was held last week in Nashville, Tennessee. The conference featured lectures from prominent experts in the field of diagnostics and biobanking, and included discussions on topics of clinical research and precision medicine, which often go hand in hand. Here are just a few highlights from the program.

Bio-IT World Brief | BGI’s subsidiary, MGI Tech, launched two new next generation genetic sequencers, MGISEQ-2000 and MGISEQ-200, at the 12th International Conference on Genomics (ICG-12) in Shenzhen.

Bio-IT World | The National Institutes of Health has been busy lately, researching ways to distinguish genomic variations that determine skin color, hair color, disease susceptibility, and other factors.

Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | As in other industries, the cloud holds the promise of flexible, globally accessible, and scalable genomics computing. Why is it, then, that – certain national initiatives aside – this promise has been so slow in materializing?