• Crescendo Bioscience’s Aspirations

    Dec 5, 2011, 07:30 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | The Russell Transcript | The rise of personalized medicine—however broadly or narrowly we define it—has been stymied in part by a lack of effective biomarkers. Cancer is perhaps an early and growing exception. The trend to profile a specific patient’s tumor for markers to help physicians pick the best therapeutic regime is a good example of the growing sophistication of biomarkers and their long-term potential as the cost of performing such tests declines.  

     

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  • H3 Biomedicine: Health, Hope and Heaps of Japanese Funding

    Dec 2, 2011, 09:15 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | The dedication of oncology drug company H3 Biomedicine's sparkling new laboratories in the heart of Kendall Square is more notable for the liberating and possibly unique funding from Japan drug maker Eisai Co., which is provding $200 million over ten years to allow the company to focus on the science of drug discovery and development.  

     

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  • Why It's Open Science for Allen Brain Institute

    Dec 2, 2011, 03:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Journal | The Allen Institute for Brain Science chose to make all of its data freely available online in an effort to accelerate research on brain diseases. The institute decided in 2002 that the best way to propel neuroscience forward would be to build a molecular-level, three-dimensional map of the mouse brain and give it away. 
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  • How Data Handling Could Stall Genomic Medicine

    Dec 1, 2011, 03:25 AM by Michael Croft
    New York Times | BGI's sequencers are now producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day, and shipping the results to customers via FedEx. Data handling is now the major bottleneck of the genomics industry and it could delay the day when DNA sequencing is used in medicine.
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  • Science in Thrall to FDA

    Nov 30, 2011, 09:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider | Risk aversion is the inherent enemy of progress. In a free society we can each seek our own balance, accepting the consequences. But when entrenched interests are allowed to thwart attempts by innovators and entrepreneurs to challenge the status quo, we all pay the price. As America slides into malaise and decline, nowhere is this more evident than in our passive acceptance of the absolute power of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—even in the face of certain death. It need not be so.
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  • The British are Coming: Connecting People and Patients

    Nov 29, 2011, 01:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Why would a chemist who has worked for some of the leading bio-IT companies of the 15-20 years, including Celera Genomics, Applied Biosystems, D.E. Shaw Ventures and IBM, find himself working for the company formerly known as British Telecom? “I was just as surprised,” said Yury Rozenman, who is BT Global Services’ head of marketing strategy and solution development for life sciences. 
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  • Survey Says: Tool Up for Smarter Clinical Studies

    Nov 28, 2011, 00:45 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Separate industry surveys by information technology research and advisory firm Gartner and global software company ClearTrial make a strong case for clinical resource management tools in the cost-cutting arsenal of biopharmaceutical and medical device companies.  

     

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  • Cycle Computing Announces BigScience Challenge Finalists

    Nov 23, 2011, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Compute Cycles Blog | Cycle Computing announced the finalists of the CycleCloud BigScience Challenge at Supercomputing 11. They will announce a grand prize winner who will recieve $12,5000 worth of computing time.
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  • Washington University unveils 'GPS' cancer gene sequencing panel

    Nov 22, 2011, 08:15 AM by Michael Croft
    Washington University |  A new medical service called Genomics and Pathology Services at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (GPS@WUSTL) plans to offer a new sequencing test for mutations in 28 cancer-associated genes, which can be ordered by physicians across the U.S. to simultaneously examine a group of genes likely to influence treatment of a patient’s tumor.
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  • An Insider Perspective on PAREXEL

    Nov 22, 2011, 02:40 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Mark Goldberg, PAREXEL’s chief operating officer, recently sat down with Bio•IT World chief editor Kevin Davies to discuss the importance of convergence in Perceptive Informatics’ suite of eClinical offerings, and to share his insights on the future opportunities, trends, and challenges facing the industry. 
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  • Texas Congressman Seeks to Block FDA Regulating Genetic Tests

    Nov 21, 2011, 09:40 AM by Michael Croft
    The Hill | Letting the FDA regulate genetic tests would cripple innovation in a field with tremendous promise for patients and U.S. competitiveness, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said last week at a policy forum co-sponsored by the American Clinical Laboratory Association.
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  • Open Data and Patient Modeling in Europe

    Nov 21, 2011, 09:15 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | HANNOVER, GERMANY—“The tools and library situation in bioinformatics is an open-source zoo,” said Misha Kapushesksy, functional genomics team leader with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), during his presentation on the Gene Expression Atlas platform. If that’s so, attendees got quite a tour of menagerie at the third annual Bio-IT World Europe conference*, with much emphasis on open-source platforms and cloud deployments.   

     

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  • Notes from the Floor: SC11

    Nov 18, 2011, 04:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | This week’s Supercomputing 11 (SC11) conference in Seattle was full of news and product announcements across the industry, many of which featured companies active in life sciences. Here’s just a sampling of what caught Bio-IT World’s eye and ear.
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  • Can Big Data Fix Healthcare?

    Nov 17, 2011, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft
    Forbes.com | "The era  of Big Data in healthcare has arrived," says GNS Healthcare CEO and co-founder Colin Hill in his debut "Healthcare 2020" blog.
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  • Perakslis, Mesirov and Leach Named Bio-IT World Expo 2012 Keynotes

    Nov 17, 2011, 08:35 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World has announced that Eric Perakslis (the newly appointed FDA CIO), Martin Leach (CIO, Broad Institute) and Jill Mesirov (chief informatics officer, Broad Institute) will be the featured keynote speakers at the 10th anniversary Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, which will be held in Boston on April 24-26, 2012.  

     

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  • PerkinElmer Targets Holistic Data Solutions

    Nov 17, 2011, 01:55 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | With its recent acquisitions of CambridgeSoft and Geospiza to name but two, PerkinElmer is signaling a new strategy that highlights data analysis and software as much as its traditional strengths in hardware and chemical analysis. Spearheading the new strategy is Dan Marshak, an accomplished cell biologist who has served as PerkinElmer’s chief scientific officer for five years. Marshak sat down with Bio•IT World chief editor Kevin Davies to discuss PerkinElmer’s evolving strategy from both business and scientific perspectives. 

     

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  • The Utility of Cloud Computing

    Nov 16, 2011, 01:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World |In September 2011, we held our first standalone conference on the topic. Experts—users and vendors alike—gathered for two days of sharing insights and progress. The takeaway was that more and more users were comfortable with the flexibility, cost, and even security afforded by the cloud.
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  • Video: James Watson on Whole Genome Sequencing

    Nov 15, 2011, 02:00 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | The complete video recording of the opening plenary session of last month's International Congress of Human Genetics, entitled “Whole Genome Sequencing: To do it or not to do it?”, featuring Nobel laureate Jim Watson and moderated by Bio-IT World's Kevin Davies, has just been posted. 

     

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  • BGI Releases Updated Bioinformatics Software and Datasets

    Nov 14, 2011, 15:50 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | BGI used the opening of its annual international genomics conference, ICG-VI in Shenzhen, China, to announce the launch of new bioinformatics analysis software and pipelines, cloud-based solutions, and a new freely accessible database for large-scale data. 
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  • New Top500 List Expands Distance Between Top Supercomputers

    Nov 14, 2011, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Top500 | Top500 released their most updated list at Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) today. The order of the top ten systems has not changed since June, but Japan's "K Computer", at the number one spot, completed a build out to make it four times as powerful as China's Tianhe-1A system in the number two position.
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