• Jolly Jay Flatley Ushers in Another Big Year for Illumina

    Jan 12, 2016, 14:40 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference comes but once a year. Now it’s here, now it’s here, and Illumina CEO Jay Flatley has honored his seasonal tradition by releasing a new next-generation sequencer in his address to investors.
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  • Certara Launches a Strategic Drug Development Consulting Company in China

    Jan 12, 2016, 09:44 AM by Michael Croft
    PRINCETON, NJ - Jan 12, 2016 - Certara®, the global biosimulation technology-enabled drug development company, today announced the launch of Certara Strategic Consulting China in Shanghai
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  • Illumina Spinoff GRAIL to Trial Liquid Biopsies for Early Detection of Cancer

    Jan 11, 2016, 11:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Illumina, the dominant manufacturer of DNA sequencing technology, has formed a spinoff company called GRAIL to experiment with a pan-cancer blood test, an undertaking for which hundreds of thousands of patients may be enrolled in clinical studies.
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  • You're Probably Not Mostly Microbes

    Jan 8, 2016, 14:19 PM by Michael Croft
    The Atlantic | A new study revises the most famous "fact" about the microbiome: that microbes outnumber human cells in the body ten to one.
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  • BioMérieux and Illumina Use Whole Genome Sequencing to Monitor Hospital Infections

    Jan 8, 2016, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | In partnership with Illumina, multinational diagnostics company bioMérieux has launched EpiSeq, the first commercial system to monitor outbreaks in hospitals by sequencing and analyzing the whole genomes of bacteria.
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  • Moderna Signs Deal with Contract Researcher to Bring mRNA Therapies Into Clinical Trials

    Jan 8, 2016, 10:12 AM by Michael Croft
    FierceBiotech | Moderna Therapeutics, a high-profile private biotech with scores of preclinical projects, is finally moving toward human trials, recruiting one of the world's largest CROs to help get its much-hyped pipeline moving.
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  • A Precision Medicine Blitz in China

    Jan 6, 2016, 09:38 AM by Michael Croft
    Nature News | A new push by the Chinese government for research in genomic health is expected to dwarf the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative in both scale and funding, although China's shortage of physicians and drug development capacity may make it hard to capitalize on new discoveries.
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  • Editas Medicine Files for CRISPR Technology's First IPO

    Jan 5, 2016, 12:15 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Still facing a looming patent dispute over its most basic intellectual property, Editas Medicine registered with the SEC for an initial public offering this week, making it the first therapeutics company based on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to go public.
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  • Who Can Host Biology's Big Data?

    Jan 4, 2016, 11:41 AM by Michael Croft
    Forbes | The National Institutes of Health expects to shortly phase out its funding for the maintenance of databases like Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, leaving the future of these invaluable resources for the life sciences uncertain.
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  • December News and Product Briefs

    Dec 30, 2015, 08:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The latest products and announcements from around the industry, including the tranSMART Foundation absorbing the OpenBEL project, and an expanded organs-on-chips program at Merck.
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  • Social Problems due to Drug Abuse Driving Substance Abuse Treatment Market

    Dec 30, 2015, 03:16 AM by Michael Croft
    ALBANY, NY, UNITED STATES - Dec 30, 2015 - Substance abuse refers to the use of psychoactive substances, which include alcohol and illicit drugs, to the extent that it is harmful or hazardous
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  • Silicon Valley's Dubious Biotech Investments

    Dec 29, 2015, 13:14 PM by Michael Croft
    The Verge | Verge Editors Elizabeth Lopatto and Ben Popper discuss high-tech investors' vulnerability to shaky claims in the life sciences.
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  • The Fuzzy Definition of 'GMO'

    Dec 28, 2015, 11:15 AM by Michael Croft
    Grist | The tangled history of agricultural technology, and nature's dazzling array of genetic interventions, make it intractably hard to come up with a crisp, consistent meaning for "genetically modified organism."
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  • Wellcome Trust Introduces Mykrobe Predictor for Genetic Analysis of Antibiotic Resistance

    Dec 23, 2015, 14:30 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | A large team of researchers led by Zamin Iqbal of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics has published a new software tool that rapidly identifies antibiotic-resistant bacteria using DNA data, beginning with studies of Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
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  • Foundation Medicine, UnitedHealthcare Sign Lung Cancer Profiling Agreement

    Dec 22, 2015, 17:00 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World News Brief | Foundation Medicine has signed an agreement with UnitedHealthcare to offer FoundationOne, a comprehensive genomic profiling assay for solid tumors, to patients with metastatic stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
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  • Triumph of the Public Cloud

    Dec 22, 2015, 15:44 PM by Michael Croft
    Wired | A decade after the launch of Amazon Web Services, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward the transfer of computing to cloud services.
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  • OrbiMed Launches New VC Fund with $950m

    Dec 21, 2015, 16:00 PM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World News Brief | OrbiMed, a leading investment firm focused on the healthcare sector, today announced the closing of its next venture capital fund, OrbiMed Private Investments VI, LP, with $950 million in limited partner commitments.

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  • New Persephone Technology to Be Demonstrated at Genome Conference

    Dec 21, 2015, 12:42 PM by Michael Croft
    THOUSAND OAKS, CA - Dec 21, 2015 - Ceres, Inc. (NASDAQ: CERE), an agricultural biotechnology company, today announced that its genomics team will demonstrate new features of its Persephone software technology at the upcoming International Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, Calif
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  • U.S. Department of Energy Awards $13.5M to Enhance Sorghum for Biofuel

    Dec 21, 2015, 10:40 AM by Michael Croft
    ST. LOUIS, MO, UNITED STATES - Dec 21, 2015 - The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center announced that it will be part of a major collaborative research project to improve sorghum's productivity under resource-limited conditions
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  • GENEWIZ Acquires the Genomic Services Business of Beckman Coulter

    Dec 21, 2015, 10:05 AM by Michael Croft
    SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ, UNITED STATES - Dec 21, 2015 - Leading global genomics service provider, GENEWIZ, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the genomic services business of Beckman Coulter, which delivers expert genomics sequencing solutions to healthcare businesses, as well as academic and government institutions worldwide (GS)
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