• Merck Acquires Cancer Drug Rights

    Apr 17, 2012, 04:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Reuters | Merck has acquired the rights to an Endocyte cancer drug candidate for $120 million and up to $880 million in milestone payments.
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  • Geneticists Respond to DNA Prediction Study

    Apr 17, 2012, 03:40 AM by Michael Croft

    UCSF | Genetics experts respond to recent press about the limits of personal genomics. In a nutshell: well duh! 

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  • Structure-Based Drug Design for Pharma

    Apr 17, 2012, 03:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Journal | Computer-aided drug design (or structure-based design) is taking off in pharma with Pfizer, Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi all using structure-based design in recently launched or late-stage compounds.
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  • Customer Centricity in Life Sciences

    Apr 16, 2012, 03:05 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | A fundamental requirement for success in the life sciences industry is the ability to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with all customers (i.e. health care professionals and patients). In an ideal world, life sciences companies would have all the information about any given customer at their fingertips. However, even if this were possible, the information is of little value if you cannot utilize it to better serve your customers at the point of interaction, across all contact channels and organizational silos. 

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  • Data from the Real World

    Apr 13, 2012, 01:15 AM by Michael Croft
    Forbes | GNS Healthcare executives discuss "real world outcomes" in clinical trials and the concept of "always-on" trials that are constantly gathering data.
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  • Roche Says Illumina is Not Apple

    Apr 12, 2012, 04:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Journal | With a week to go before Illumina's annual meeting, Roche sent another letter to shareholders yesterday assuring them that Illumina is not Apple. Illumina has made good use of a journalist's quote comparing the two companies, but Roche hopes to squelch such comparisons.
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  • SGI Releases Flexible, NAS Solution

    Apr 11, 2012, 04:40 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | SGI released SGI NAS yesterday, a full-featured, flexible enterprise-class open storage solution. SGI NAS fully integrated with the SGI Modular InfiniteStorage product family, and can start small and yet scale to multiple petabytes of unified storage according to business demands. 
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  • A Look at Genomic Health and Its CEO

    Apr 11, 2012, 04:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Peninsula Press | Genomic Health's CEO is as invested in her team and her company as she is in patients. The company is pairing sequencing with diagnostics.
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  • Genomics and the Cloud: a Match Made in Heaven?

    Apr 11, 2012, 04:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Wired | When Amazon and the National Institutes of Health announced that all of the data from the 1000 Genomes Project would go into the Amazon Cloud, freely accessible to the public, that was just the beginning.
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  • Singapore Researchers Identify 600 New Mutated Genes in Stomach Cancer

    Apr 10, 2012, 03:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | SINGAPORE—Researchers in Singapore have identified over 600 previously unknown genes mutated in stomach cancer. Their findings were published online in Nature Genetics on April 8. 
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  • Wellcome Trust Throws Weight Behind Open Access Campaign

    Apr 10, 2012, 01:35 AM by Michael Croft
    The Guardian | The Wellcome Trust has joined the "academic spring"--an open access campaign lobbying for all research papers to be shared, saying that it will soon adopt more stringent methods to ensure that all of the research it funds is freely available to the public within six months of first publication. 
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  • LiquidGrids Scans Social Media for Pharma Keywords

    Apr 10, 2012, 01:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Xconomy | LiquidGrids re-launched its business and overhauled its technology at the end of March to carry out data mining on social media sites for pharma companies. The goal is to identify trends and help customers take advantage of marketing opportunities in social media.
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  • Academic Research Largely Not Reproducible

    Apr 9, 2012, 00:15 AM by Michael Croft
    The Hook | A new Nature commentary finds that 9 of 10 pre-clinical cancer research studies cannot be replicated. Amgen researchers tried to confirm the findings of published academic research, and could only do so in 6 of the 53 papers they considered.
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  • Third-Party Firm Sides With Illumina

    Apr 9, 2012, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Barron's | Shareholder advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services has spoken up for Illumina in the Illumina-Roche standoff.
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  • Takeda Joins Structural Genomics Consortium

    Apr 6, 2012, 03:10 AM by Michael Croft
    News Brief | Takeda Pharmaceutical has joined the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private partnership that supports the discovery of new medicines through open access research. Takeda's contribution raises the SGC's funds to $50 million.
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  • April Free Trials and Downloads

    Apr 5, 2012, 03:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Free trials & downloads featuring NGS plugins, aligner software, tox screening, ELNs, data visualization, digital signatures, and more. 
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  • GE Buys Contract Sequencing Company

    Apr 5, 2012, 00:40 AM by Michael Croft
    WSJ Health Blog | GE is increasing its investment in personalized medicine with the acquisition of SeqWright, a contract sequencing company in Houston. 
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  • Genomic Insight into Adaptations

    Apr 5, 2012, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    HHMI | Researchers from the Broad Institute have sequenced the genome of the three-spine stickleback, a small migratory fish, and have caught a glimpse of gene adaptations in action. Their findings are published today in Nature.
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  • Radiant Sage Boosts Pfizer’s Imaging Pipeline

    Apr 4, 2012, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | It has taken more than a decade, but the ideas of Venkatesan Thangaraj to create a pharma pipeline for image management are maturing so quickly that he sees the potential of developing an industry standard that enables all trial sponsors and vendors to have a single customizable tool for handling clinical imaging data. 
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  • AACR Genomics Highlights

    Apr 4, 2012, 03:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Nature News | The American Association for Cancer Research meeting wraps up today, and has covered the gamut of topics from deep digital sequencing to fixing clinical trials to genomics-based cancer tests and predictions.
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