• Big-Bucks Biology's Broken Business Model

    Aug 22, 2011, 08:10 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider | "Tell me how someone is compensated and I’ll tell you how they’ll behave,” goes the old adage. If non-monetary rewards are considered alongside financial remuneration this pretty much describes why federally funded research in the life sciences is producing less and less bang for more and more bucks. And why the scientific literature is at risk of becoming polluted with overreaching claims, obfuscated shortcomings, and non-reproducible results. 

     

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  • Mary Jane's First Genome

    Aug 18, 2011, 05:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Boston Herald | Kevin McKernan, chief developer of the SOLiD platform, has a new venture and has been spending quite a lot of time with the Cannabis plant. Medicinal Genomics has announced the full genome sequencing of Cannabis.
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  • Stanford Team Reports Advance in Computational Drug Repositioning

    Aug 17, 2011, 16:30 PM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Journal | In a spot of "educated fishing," Atul Butte and colleagues at Stanford University report an innovative way to identify and reposition drugs against diseases they weren't originally designed to combat. The stories of two such repurposed drugs, targeting inflammatory bowel disease and lung cancer, are described in a pair of new papers in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
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  • Cancer and the Genome: The Bigger Picture

    Aug 17, 2011, 03:55 AM by Michael Croft
    New York Times | New theories about cancer suggest pseudogenes in the noncoding regions of DNA and microbial gene exchange may be behind the development of some cancers. 
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  • Evolution of the Textbook

    Aug 16, 2011, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft
    HHMI Bulletin | Publishers are beginning to go digital with biology textbooks, pushing boundaries to give students a more personalized, interactive experience.
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  • DREAM6 Breaks New Ground

    Aug 16, 2011, 02:40 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Roughly five years ago the organizers of DREAM—Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—set out to find the best algorithms for inferring biological networks from blinded data sets. It turns out there's no such critter as the perfect algorthm.  

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  • Halcyon Molecular: Anatomy of a NGS Start-Up

    Aug 15, 2011, 09:40 AM by Michael Croft
    The Independent | William and Michael Andregg, co-founders of Silicon Valley next-gen sequencing start-up Halcyon Molecular, have given their most extensive interview to date on the motivation and circumstances that led to the launch of this ambitious company in 2008, funded in large part by the 'PayPal mafia.' 
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  • Back to Berlin for PacBio's Jonas Korlach

    Aug 12, 2011, 12:50 PM by Michael Croft

    San Jose Mercury News | The co-founder of Pacific Biosciences, Jonas Korlach, is preparing to return to Berlin for the official unveiling of the first PacBio instrument in his native land. In 1989, a 16-year-old Korlach walked through the Brandenburg Gate, just a few miles from his home in East Berlin. 

     

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  • Five Questions for Broad Institute CIO Martin Leach

    Aug 12, 2011, 09:30 AM by Michael Croft
    Broad Institute | Settling into his new digs at the Broad Institute, CIO Martin Leach answers five questions about IT at the Broad, his journey to the institute, and lessons that can be learned from the world of video gaming.
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  • Data for Doctors: Big Data Meets a Big Business

    Aug 9, 2011, 10:40 AM by Michael Croft
    GigaOM | Ted Corbett, director of knowledge management at Seattle Children’s Hospital, is using software from a company called Tableau to draw smart inferences from the 10 terabytes of data locked up in his servers and warehousing appliances.
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  • Turning Blood into Gold: The Wellness Chip

    Aug 9, 2011, 00:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | COVER STORY: Fourteen years after conceiving a tool to discover and measure protein biomarkers, Larry Gold and his colleagues at SomaLogic are poised to see their first diagnostic—a lung cancer blood test--reach the marketplace.
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  • UK Study Identifies Ovarian Cancer Risk Gene

    Aug 8, 2011, 11:25 AM by Michael Croft
    The Independent | A new study funded by Cancer Research UK has identified a genetic glitch in a known DNA repair gene that increases a woman's risk of ovarian cancer six-fold. One in every 11 women who carry a mutation in the RAD51D gene is likely to develop ovarian cancer in her lifetime. 
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  • Genome Analytics for All

    Aug 8, 2011, 00:30 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Pauline Ng is planning open source, open access analytics for the genomes to come.

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  • Ion Torrent Reports 265 Base Pair Reads

    Aug 5, 2011, 04:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Late Wednesday, Life Technologies released an application note and supporting data for the Ion Torrent Personal Genomics Machine reporting reads up to 265 base pairs in length using E. coli data.
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  • CROs Doing More Research, Discovery

    Aug 3, 2011, 01:30 AM by Michael Croft
    San Diego Union Tribune | CRO's portion of the drug discovery market is expanding rapidly. In 2010 about 21 percent of R&D spending worldwide went to CROs 
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  • Time for Pharma to Face Social Media Fears?

    Aug 2, 2011, 02:00 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | As tools like Facebook and Twitter become a permanent reality of human interaction, savvy businesses are standing up and taking notice. Yet the pharmaceutical industry remains apprehensive about jumping on the social media bandwagon.  

     

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  • Federal Court Rules in Favor of Gene Patents

    Aug 1, 2011, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    New York Times | The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled on Friday that genes can be patented, overturning a lower court decision.
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  • Phenomic Outcome Research with Patient-Volunteers

    Jul 29, 2011, 04:20 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World Video | At the Bio-IT World Expo, Ben Heywood, co-founder and CEO of PatientsLikeMe, quoted Catherine the Great: “A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache.”
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  • Team Tracks E. coli's Evolution with PacBio Sequencing

    Jul 28, 2011, 01:20 AM by Michael Croft
    HHMI | An international team of researchers seeking to understand the recent particularly virulent E. coli infections have compared the bacteria's genome to that of 11 related strains of E. coli using Pacific Biosciences sequencing technology.
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  • Balancing Race in Personal Genomics

    Jul 27, 2011, 08:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Wired | Yesterday 23andMe launched the Roots into the Future project, an attempt to add race balance to personal genomics.
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