Dec 18, 2012, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

eWeek | Oracle announced a new big data appliance with Cloudera yesterday. Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 system of hardware and software has been upgraded to include Intel’s newest processors and the latest release of Cloudera.

Dec 18, 2012, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

The Street | The votes are in and Leonard Schleifer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has been named the best biotech CEO of 2012 in The Street's annual contest.

Dec 17, 2012, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Network World | Rackspace has announced new capabilities for data hosting and management. A NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS) from a company named Cloudant is now available in Rackspace's cloud. The service adds to database tools Rackspace already provides.

Dec 17, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Reuters | In findings published on Thursday in Science, researchers at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto showed that cancer cells' DNA is not wholly responsible for cancer. Researchers found that despite having identical genetic mutations, colorectal cancer cells behaved as differently as if they were genetic strangers.

Dec 14, 2012, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

PLOS Computational Biology | In a paper published earlier this month in PLOS Computational Biology, Andreas Prlić of the San Diego Supercomputing Center and James B. Procter of the University of Dundee lay out ten simple rules for open development of scientific software. Among them: Don't Reinvent the Wheel; Be Your Own User; Nurture Your Community; and Science Counts.

Dec 14, 2012, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World Roundup | The BGI-Complete Genomics deal continues to stir controversy. Yesterday, Michael Wessel and Larry Wortzel, congressionally-appointed members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, raised national security concerns about the deal. Complete Genomics' CEO Cliff Reid answered their claims--and others proposed by Illumina--in a memo this morning to Complete Genomics' staff.

Dec 14, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Globe and Mail | Are the promises of personalized genomics being oversold? We are not in a personalized medicine revolution, Timothy Caulfield contends. Overhyping the promise, "can hurt the science, by creating unrealistic expectations, and distract us from other, more effective areas of health promotion."

Dec 13, 2012, 15:00 PM by Michael Croft

BBC | University of Dundee researchers are applying advanced statistics and data analysis to drug discovery. Andrew Hopkins, Chair of Medicinal Informatics at Dundee, says he and his colleagues have "effectively proved the concept of automated design of new compounds showing that by using algorithms to process massive amounts of data, we can tackle problems of huge complexity."

Dec 13, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | A small biotech company, Population Diagnostics (PDx), has collaborated with researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (SickKids) to provide a potentially major step forward in the search for a diagnostic test for autism. 

Dec 13, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Mercury News | Michael Wessel and Larry Wortzel, congressionally-appointed members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, recommend the utmost scrutiny of the BGI-Complete Genomics deal on national security grounds.

Dec 12, 2012, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

eWeek | Amazon Web Services announced the winners of its first annual Spotathon event last week. The competition recognized innovative uses of Spot instances to help small companies achieve massive scale and save time and money.

Dec 11, 2012, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft

The Street| The Street has nominated four biotech CEOs for the title of Best Biotech CEO of 2012: the heads of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Gilead Sciences, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Sarepta Therapeutics.

Dec 11, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

SureChem Blog | More than 8 million SureChem structures are now available in PubChem, the world's largest free public chemistry database. The structures come from US, EP, and WO patents, and Japan patent abstracts. More than 4 million are unique to SureChem.

Dec 11, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Technology Review | Moderna Therapeutics has billed itself the next Genentech. It's raised more than $40 milion and has attracted some big names for its Scientific Advisory Board. But questions remain about the company's RNA technology.

Dec 10, 2012, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Xconomy | Does Amgen's purchase of deCODE present a model for counteracting failure rates in drug discovery. Terry McGuire points out: "Amgen acquired deCODE for more than its patents, genetic testing business, or drug development projects..."

Dec 10, 2012, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Deal Book | Amgen announced this morning that it would buy Icelandic personal genomics pioneer deCODE for $415 million in cash. deCODE has been plagued by financial woes for years, even while it published genetic discoveries.

Dec 10, 2012, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World Guest Commentary | What happens when, during the course of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) a patient or research subject, an investigator sequences and analyzes a disease gene that has been patented? The U.S. Supreme Court will shed some light on this question next year when it issues its ruling in the long-running Myriad Genetics saga. 

Dec 7, 2012, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Wall Street Journal | Roche and Oxford University are leading the push to build the world's largest repository of induced pluripotent stem cells. Ten drug companies and 23 universities have joined to launch StemBANCC.

Dec 7, 2012, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

NY Genome | The 1000 Genomes project is revealing not-so-rare rare mutations. Of the 1,092 people from 14 populations currently sequenced, more than expected carry rare variations. Researcher theorize that the rate of population growth has exceeded the rate at which natural selection can remove problematic alleles.

Dec 7, 2012, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

HPC Wire | The competition for the newest high performance computing chips is heating up. Intel is shipping its Xeon Phi GPU competitior chips. NVIDIA has launched a new line of Kepler GPUs. And AMD has  anew FirePro S10000 graphics card.