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.

Feb 21, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Following a flagship collaboration with Foundation Medicine to provide interpretative software for genome analysis in cancer patients, N-of-One has announced a new partnership with the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

Feb 20, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

New York Times | Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg have announced the winners of the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Eleven scientists were awarded $3 million each for their work.

Feb 20, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

eWeek |  In a media event yesterday, NetApp unveiled its first all-solid-state array, a new flash accelerator for servers, and a future new storage line coming out in 2014.

Feb 20, 2013, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Seventeen million babies are born each year in China. Yet in 2010, the country only had the capacity to offer 150,000 amniocenteses a year. As the most populous country in the world with a well-established one child policy, that number is astonishingly low. And it represents a ripe market for the next generation of prenatal testing. Now Berry Genomics, co-founded by Daixing Zhou, is hoping to capitalize on the market in China.

Feb 19, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Technology Review | Coriell Life Sciences--a startup from a partnership between Coriell Institute for Medical Research and IBM--aims to facilitate genomics in the clinic. The company plans to offer sequencing, data storage in a "gene vault", and data delivery in an electronic medical record.

Feb 19, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Sage Bionetworks and the DREAM Project— Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—are merging efforts to run open science computational challenges which foster the broader collaboration of the research community and provide a meaningful impact to both discovery and clinical research.

Feb 18, 2013, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft

Xconomy | After layoffs in the 150,000 range from 2009-2012, pharma and biotech are lamenting their lack of qualified workers to grow their businesses.

Feb 18, 2013, 08:50 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Sales of the Ion Torrent desktop sequencers exceed those of its rival MiSeq machine from Illumina, according to a new report from Macquarie Equities Research, which highlights encouraging trends for both Illumina and Ion Torrent parent company, Life Technologies.