Mar 6, 2013, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | WALTHAM, Mass.—The chief architects of a fledgling coalition of IT firms, consultancies and biopharma representatives declared their first meeting last week a promising success.

Mar 6, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Pathogens: Genes and Genomes | Oxford Nanopore was a conspicuous no-show on the program at the recent AGBT conference, in stark contrast to CTO Clive Brown’s blockbuster presentation 12 months earlier. But blogger Nick Loman snagged a bar-room chat with the reclusive Brown last month and reveals the major reason why the company has been so quiet lately: a complete redesign of the custom sensor microchip (ASIC) underlying the nanopore array.

Mar 5, 2013, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Nancy J. Kelley, the founding executive director of the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and the person most responsible for conceiving and bringing the ambitious institute to fruition, is stepping down from her leadership role.

Mar 5, 2013, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Bioinformatics.org has released the five finalists for the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. Voting is open until Sunday, March 10.

Mar 5, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Computerworld | Amazon Web Services is developing a set of system analysis tools and making them available for free for a month. The AWS Trusted Advisor service is now in beta.

Mar 4, 2013, 16:00 PM by Michael Croft

Computerworld | HP is striving to build ARM servers with Texas Instruments chips. HP's Project Moonshot hopes to deliver low-power servers with either Intel or ARM processors.

Mar 4, 2013, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft

FT Magazine | On the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, a treasury of archives is to be placed online by the Wellcome Library including Crick's pencil drawing of the double helix, photos of the researchers at work, letters between Crick and Maurice Wilkins, and an early draft of the Nature paper.

Mar 4, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Techonomy | A new startup out of Stanford is using data-mining techniques to predict whether or not IVF will succeed. Univfy compares personal health information with large data sets of previous IVF data to predict a woman's likely response.

Mar 4, 2013, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bloomberg | Federal cost cutting measures should look no farther than the FDA, argues an op ed in Bloomberg. First on the chopping block: Phase 3 clinical trials.

Mar 1, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

HPC Wire | 2012 was a big year for Cycle Computing and utility supercomputing. Jason Stowe of Cycle says that 2012 was a turning point for the industry.

Feb 28, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Spectrum | A personal genome exploration, Eliza Strickland goes to Ion Torrent's headquarters for a look inside Jonathan Rothberg's newest machine--the Ion Proton System--and her own genome.

Feb 28, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

News Brief | A research team at Weill Cornell Medical College has solved the 3D crystal structure of a member protein in one of the most important classes of human proteins—the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The results were published yesterday in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Feb 27, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

The Atlantic | Watson is reading your medical records--or at least some case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. The IBM supercomputer is learning to make diagnoses and recommend treatments.

Feb 26, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Bloomberg | The Faroe Islands' 50,000 inhabitants are offering up their DNA for research. The plan is for every citizen to be sequenced, and to use the data for medical research.

Feb 26, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

New York Times | 60 years ago this week, James Watson pieced together the final pieces of a model of DNA and, together with his colleague Francis Crick, constructed the iconic double helix model. The classic paper by Crick and Watson wasn’t published in Nature for a further two months, but three weeks after the model was made, Crick relayed the discovery and its significance in a remarkable letter to his 12-year-old son Michael. “My dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery,” begins the letter.

Feb 25, 2013, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft

In the Pipeline | The ENCODE project has received a thorough dressing down in a new Genome Biology and Evolution paper by Dan Graur and colleagues. The authors highlight six major errors in the ENCODE project that led to "absurd conclusion[s]". Derek Lowe breaks down the claims (accusations?) on his blog.

Feb 25, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Thanks to a $1.9 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PatientsLikeMe will lead development of truly “patient-centered” health outcome measures via the world’s first open-participation research platform. Never before have crowdsourcing approaches to authoring, reviewing, and validating outcome measures been attempted on a single system, says Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of the nearly 200,000-member patient network.

Feb 25, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | The 2013 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference—likened by one participant as “the bastard child of a Gordon Conference and a Las Vegas Porn Convention"—may have lacked the show-stopping presentation of an Oxford Nanopore this year, but there was plenty to admire on the new technology front.

Feb 22, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Reddit | Yesterday Eric Lander, President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, spent a couple of hours on Reddit doing an AMA open Q&A session. Questions ranged from the ridiulous to the profound, but Lander was a good sport. He weighed in on what to do to increase the attractiveness of PhD programs; the current most important scientific questions; the coolest discoveries in the 21st century; immortality; his mustache; genetics in 10-20 years; and more.

Feb 22, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | A reproductive clinic in New Jersey has successfully used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to screen embryos conceived in otherwise routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) cases prior to implantation. The news was reported in a talk yesterday evening at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference by Dagan Wells, a geneticist at the University of Oxford.