• Flatley Flatly Rejects Roche Unsolicited Bid for Illumina

    Feb 8, 2012, 07:20 AM by Michael Croft
    BusinessWire | Illumina CEO Jay Flatley has informed Roche that its unsolicited tender offer of $44.50 per share is "grossly inadequate in multiple respects, dramatically undervalues Illumina and is contrary to the best interests of Illumina's stockholders."
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  • Warp Drive Bio Charts Course for Natural Product Drugs

    Feb 8, 2012, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | While many major pharma companies have been cutting back their research into natural products, Warp Drive Bio, a new start-up out of Third Rock Ventures in Boston, is dedicated to mining the genome of micro-organisms for potent natural product compounds. And in a striking $125-million deal, Warp Drive has teamed with Sanofi to provide ample funding to get operations off the ground and potentially into orbit. 
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  • Picture Perfect: Imaging in Drug Discovery and Translational Medicine

    Feb 7, 2012, 05:35 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Imaging in drug discovery has been rising to the forefront of conversations more and more recently. Managing editor Allison Proffitt spoke with Ken Kilgore, Director of Immunology Pharmacology at Janssen Research & Development (formerly Centocor Research & Development), a Johnson & Johnson company, about how—and why—imaging’s role is changing in drug discovery.
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  • Roche Calls Illumina Offer 'Full and Fair'

    Feb 6, 2012, 01:35 AM by Michael Croft
    CNBC | Roche's $44.50/share offering for Illumina is "a full and fair price," Roche CEO Severin Schwan told CNBC. He said the pharma company is "committed to making [the] transaction happen."  
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  • Norway to Sequence Genomes for National Health Care

    Feb 6, 2012, 01:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Nature | Norway plans to incorporate genome sequencing into its national health care system. The Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium will sequence the tumor genomes of 1,000 patients as part of its three-year pilot phase.
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  • AGBT Agenda Includes Oxford Nanopore Sighting

    Feb 1, 2012, 15:40 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The highly anticipated, newly released agenda for the sold-out AGBT conference in two weeks reveals several technology nuggets, including kinetic incorporation data from PacBio, the latest results in benchtop sequencing from Illumina's MiSeq and Ion Torrent's PGM, and data from at least two new NGS systems, including the long-awaited debut of Oxford Nanopore. 
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  • Vertex’ Newly Approved Cystic Fibrosis Drug Illustrates Hopes and Challenges of Treating Rare Diseases

    Feb 1, 2012, 09:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | In a triumph for cystic fibrosis research, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has received FDA approval for Kalydeco (ivacaftor, VX-770), a drug that treats a subset of CF patients, raising a debate on the future of personalized medicine and the treatment of rare diseases.
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  • No Spin Zone: Nimbus Launches E Class Flash Storage

    Jan 31, 2012, 08:10 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Could this be the beginning of the end of spinning media? Nimbus Data Solutions has launched its highest performance flash memory system, the E class, touting major improvements in scalability, power consumption, cooling efficiency and density. “It’s a chance to reinvent storage for performance and efficiency,” CEO Thomas Isakovich told Bio-IT World.  

     

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  • Phoenix Supercomputer Gateway to Personalized Medicine

    Jan 30, 2012, 12:35 PM by Michael Croft
    Arizona Republic | A massive building near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport -- the CSS Institute -- is now home to a supercomputer that one day is expected to store clinical-research reports, medical records and the decoded genetic makeup of millions of patients and their cancers.
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  • What is (Quantitative) Systems Pharmacology?

    Jan 30, 2012, 01:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Last October, Harvard Medical School announced a broad initiative in systems pharmacology while the NIH released a like-minded white paper on quantitative and systems pharmacology in the post-genomic era. That's a fair amount of attention from two very big guns on a topic that may ring both familiar and unfamiliar.
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  • Branding Academic Publishers 'Enemies of Science' is Offensive

    Jan 27, 2012, 08:45 AM by Michael Croft
    The Guardian | Noting that scientific publishers "are not philanthropists, charities or funding agencies," a member of the industry pens a rebuttal to recent staunch criticism that academic publishers are "anti-science" and "anti-publication" in light of the proposed US Research Works Act.
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  • Accelrys' Cheminformatics Solution in HEOS Cloud

    Jan 26, 2012, 09:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The Accelrys next-generation informatics suite consists of updated existing products and components, but perhaps most noteworthy is the marriage with a cloud-based product called HEOS, in partnership with Scynexis, for externalizing research. 
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  • UK Scientists Call For National DNA Database for Personalized Medicine

    Jan 26, 2012, 08:40 AM by Michael Croft
    Daily Telegraph | In a report to the UK government, a group of UK scientists argues that a national DNA database is needed if the National Health Service is to capitalise on advances in technology and offer personalised genomic medicine to all in the future.
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  • Bush Doctrine: The Pharmaceutical Safety Data Problem

    Jan 25, 2012, 14:30 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The Bush Doctrine: What the industry calls “safety data” covers everything from discovery-oriented in vitro or cell based studies to extensive GLP toxicology study data, voluminous clinical study records, and post-marketing/pharmacovigilance systems. It leads one to wonder: does anyone have informatics systems that allow safety investigators across the pharma enterprise to effectively mine this ocean of information? 
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  • Roche Launches Hostile Bid for Illumina to Reclaim Next-Gen Sequencing Mantle

    Jan 25, 2012, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft
    New York Times | Roche, the Swiss drug maker, has launched a $5.7 billion hostile bid for Illumina, going directly to the company’s shareholders. In early trading, Illumina shares soared some 40%, trading above the $44.50 Roche was willing to offer.
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  • Good Days and Bad in 2011

    Jan 24, 2012, 08:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Physicists seem to be having all the fun right now -- monster black holes, inhabitable planets, glimpses of God particles and hearty challenges to Einstein. But a list of last year's top ten science stories in the Guardian found room for only a couple of items in contemporary biology. 
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  • Children’s Hospital Launches CLARITY Challenge for Clinical Genome Interpretation

    Jan 23, 2012, 15:40 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have launched the $25,000 CLARITY Challenge, to develop standards and best practices for clinical genomic analysis and interpretation. Project co-founder Isaac Kohane says an open contest is the best way to catalyze "a public and transparent improvement of that pipeline." 
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  • Remedies for Safer Drugs

    Jan 23, 2012, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Pharmacovigilance experts have an abundance of signal detection tools to sift through large quantities of data seeking causal relationships between adverse events (AEs) and experimental drugs. They also have an assortment of data mining tools capable of finding statistical associations suggestive of problems regarding approved drugs. All this technology is intended to safeguard clinical trial participants, patients, and the reputation of recall-weary drug developers. But drug safety specialists can’t be sure which technology or signal detection method is best.
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  • Flu Researchers Voluntarily Pause

    Jan 20, 2012, 16:45 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | A group of researchers working on the H5N1 avian flu virus have agreed to a 60-day moratorium on research "to allow time for international discussion." The agreement was published in Science and Nature on Friday via a letter from 39 researchers.
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  • Fostering Innovation at Sanofi

    Jan 20, 2012, 05:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Xconomy | Chris Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi, is focusing on building innovation thanks to last year's acquisition of Genzyme and academic and biotech collaborators.
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