• ELN Excellence: The New Lab Notebooks

    Feb 22, 2012, 03:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Of all the life science software that has sprung up in the past ten years or so, electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) are the only platforms that have emerged as strategic players across the market. That’s the opinion of Michael Stapleton, General Manager, Informatics at PerkinElmer, who estimates the market penetration is still only 30% to 40%—leaving massive growth opportunities for companies including Sapio Sciences, Agilent, Rescentris, Accelrys and IDBS in the space. 
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  • Budget Woes Stall Clinical Trials and Stymie Sites

    Feb 21, 2012, 01:55 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Imagine buying a new car or a new house but not knowing the price until the papers have already been drawn up and it’s time to sign on the dotted line.  According to Christine Pierre, President of RxTrials, that’s exactly the situation investigative sites face as they attempt to negotiate budgets and contracts for clinical trials. 
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  • Beyond Nanopores: News and Notes from AGBT

    Feb 20, 2012, 00:55 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Oxford Nanopore may have stolen the show at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting* last week, but they weren’t the only company showcasing advances in next generation technologies. 
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  • Oxford Strikes First in DNA Sequencing Nanopore Wars

    Feb 17, 2012, 11:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Breaking a near total vow of silence after three years in stealth mode, Oxford Nanopore chief technology officer Clive Brown offered stunning details of the UK firm's nanopore next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology today, including a sequencing device on a USB stick, viral genomes decoded in single runs, and the prospect of the $1,000 genome in less than an hour as early as next year.
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  • Biotech Investment vs Research

    Feb 17, 2012, 03:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Xconomy | The biotech investment model is changing. Venture capitalists are no longer willing to wait for a return on their investment while science does its thing. There is a trend toward very small, single-project companies that are more compelling to big company buyers. 
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  • 2012 Franklin Award Accepting Nominations

    Feb 17, 2012, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Nominations are being accepted for the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award  for Open Access in the Life Sciences. The award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatics.org an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences. 
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  • Pharma Lit: Elsevier Serves Pharma with Acquisitions of Ariadne, Quosa

    Feb 16, 2012, 04:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | “We have a history of servicing life sciences and drug discovery/drug development in the pharma industry,” says Alexander van Boetzelaer, managing director of corporate markets for the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. But while that history is based largely on serving up traditional scientific literature, the needs of the pharma industry are changing, and Elsevier has made several acquisitions to meet those needs.
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  • Behind the Biogen-Stromedix Deal

    Feb 16, 2012, 02:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Forbes | Earlier this week Biogen Idec acquired Stromedix, a biotechnology company focused on innovative therapies for fibrosis and organ failure, for up to $526m. Two of the venture capitalists behind Stromedix talk about the startup's history and the path to Biogen.
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  • Which Grid Engine?

    Feb 15, 2012, 08:25 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | In December 2010, Oracle announced that Grid Engine (a very popular life science cluster scheduler and distributed resource manager that Oracle inherited via its purchase of Sun Microsystems) would no longer be freely available as an open-source product. Oracle's decision to make Grid Engine available only to commercially licensed customers left a large community of scientific and high performance computing users questioning the viability of their long term technical planning and HPC roadmaps. 
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  • Two Guys and a Credit Card: Metrum’s Amazon Cloud Makeover

    Feb 14, 2012, 03:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Over the past few years, many life science organizations have dabbled in cloud computing and explored infrastructure-as-a-service, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment. But one Connecticut company has decided to go for broke—transferring its entire IT infrastructure onto the Amazon cloud. 
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  • Mayo Chooses Complete Genomics for Outsourced Sequencing

    Feb 14, 2012, 01:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Cheat Sheet | The Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine has chosen Complete Genomics as its provider of outsourced whole human genome sequencing, a move which led to a 51% jump in share price on Monday morning. 
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  • The New Anti-Science Assault on US Schools

    Feb 13, 2012, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft
    The Guardian | Not withstanding the famous 2005 Pennsylvania court ruling on intelligent design, anti-evolution campaigners in the United States are now combining with climate change deniers to continue to undermine public education.
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  • BGI Researchers Report More Evidence of RNA Editing

    Feb 13, 2012, 02:15 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | In a study published online in Nature Biotechnology, BGI researchers have reported evidence of extensive RNA editing in human cells. The paper is a follow up study to last May's Science paper that initially reported sequence differences between mRNA and DNA. 
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  • The $11 Billion Molecule?

    Feb 13, 2012, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Forbes | Forbes has posted a new estimate of how much it costs pharmaceutical companies to bring a new drug to market. The result: between $4 and $11 billion per drug, far more than any previous estimate.
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  • Illumina's Numbers Without Roche

    Feb 13, 2012, 00:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Motley Fool | Illumina has rejected Roche's most recent offer, and earlier in the week released fourth-quarter numbers that were a bit less than last year's, but still expected. 
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  • Personalized Medicine Partnership Launches in Florida

    Feb 10, 2012, 02:55 AM by Michael Croft
    Orlando Sentinel | Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Florida Hospital and Moffitt Cancer Center have teamed to create Personalized Medicine Partnership of Florida.
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  • Supporting the $1000 Genome

    Feb 10, 2012, 01:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Forbes | With the $1,000 genomic sequencing barrier looming, the question remains whether we'll be able to make sense of the data to come pouring off sequencers like Life Technologies' new Ion Proton Sequencer.
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  • San Diego Gets Bulk of California NIH Grants

    Feb 9, 2012, 01:30 AM by Michael Croft
    San Diego Source | A new PricewaterhouseCoopers report shows that three of the top 10 California recipients of National Institutes of Health grants were in the San Diego area.
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  • Scientific Collaboration in New York

    Feb 9, 2012, 01:25 AM by Michael Croft
    Xconomy | The New York Genome Center will open this month, and the New York eHealth Collaborative held its first conference last year. It's been a season of collaboration for scientific organizations in the New York area.
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  • Laying the Foundation for Next-Gen Cancer Diagnostics

    Feb 8, 2012, 08:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | This summer, Foundation Medicine will launch what could be described as the next generation of cancer diagnostics. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, founded by a premier group of cancer researchers and funded by Third Rock Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures, will launch a comprehensive next-gen sequencing (NGS) profile screening some about 200 genes known to be clinically relevant and actionable in cancer using routine, formalin-fixed paraffin embedded patient cancer specimens. 
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