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 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 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

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, 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, 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.

Dec 6, 2012, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Herald Online | BIOBASE, in agreement the University of Southern California, and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, will now distribute ANNOVAR, a tool for annotation of genomic variants, to commercial users as a standalone product or complement to Genome Trax.

Dec 6, 2012, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft

Pharmalot | The former head of psychopharmacology at Boehringer Ingelheim, Frank Sams-Dodd, talks about the reason for pharma's decreased productivity, and the ways drug discovery are done that contribute to the problem.

Dec 6, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Dec 5, 2012, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Dec 5, 2012, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft

Forbes | Two years in, George Scangos is leading leads Biogen Idec's comeback story. He's cut costs and jobs and moved away from cancer research, but has invested in neuroscience and hemophilia.

Dec 5, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Boston Globe | Partners HealthCare System in Boston is launching a whole genome sequencing and interpretation service for patients at its nine hospitals across Eastern Massachusetts.

Dec 5, 2012, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Dec 4, 2012, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Computerworld | AMD has introduced low-power Opteron processors targeted for Cloud use to power Web transactions: the Opteron 4300 and 3300 chips.

Dec 4, 2012, 04:10 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Thanks to a distributed computing platform of NVIDIA GPUs, bioinformaticians at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) and UPF (Pompeu Fabra University) have used molecular simulation to explain a specific step in the maturation of HIV. The results were published in the most recent issue of PNAS.  

Dec 3, 2012, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Science Codex | Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have identified mutations in two related genes involved in neuroblastoma. The work was published yesterday in Nature Genetics.

Dec 3, 2012, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft

BBC | Flash memory is fast, but it's long been known to have reliability issues after about 10,000 read/write cycles. Researchers in Taiwan have now shown that a 800C jolt of heat can "heal" the memory, making it good for up to 100 million cycles.

Dec 3, 2012, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | In the not-so-distant future, the pharmaceutical industry will need to move away from serendipity and its “blockbuster” drug development approach to become a service-based business specializing in patient-specific therapeutics delivering desired outcomes at the desired price. Clinical trials, of necessity, will be re-engineered to reflect real-world circumstances and turn adaptive study programs into a competitive advantage. Practicing clinicians will be dissuaded from using high-cost medicines and more actively participate in modeling and simulation exercises to help get better products to patients sooner.