Bio-IT World | Accelrys is releasing its "next-generation informatics suite" this week, including a chemical registration system and a Cloud-based portal called HEOS in partnership with SCYNEXIS, in what one company executive calls the first coherent suite to span scientists' daily workflows since the 2010 merger with Symyx.  

Bio-IT World | The 2012 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition has released its call for entries. Since 2003, Bio-IT World's Best Practices competition has been recognizing outstanding examples of technology and strategic innovation initiatives across the drug discovery enterprise. The deadline for entry is January 13, 2012, and the early bird deadline is December 16, 2011.  

Bio-IT World  | DNA Electronics certainly sounds like the quintessential bio-IT company, but this London firm is quietly making waves in the field of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and molecular diagnostics. Some of the firm’s key intellectual property (IP) is providing the foundation for present and future semiconductor sequencing platforms. And some of that same technology lies at the core of the firm’s newly developed handheld device, dubbed the SNP-DR, which can detect dozens of DNA variants in a saliva sample within 20-30 minutes.  

Bio-IT World | If your image of a research librarian is the soft-spoken, bespectacled woman politely shushing you when you’re talking in the library, that outdated perception couldn’t be further from the truth. Research librarians are highly skilled data analysts and business experts playing key roles in driving company performance, particularly in life sciences organizations. They ensure the most talented project teams make the right choices, perform at their highest levels, and reach outcomes their companies are striving for.  

Bio-IT World | ‘Scaling to bigger and better hardware doesn’t help if your data is [sic] growing in size faster than your hardware,” says Titus Brown at Michigan State University. He and others in the NGS community are calling for software solutions to their NGS data woes instead of massive storage options. In an August post on his blog, “Daily Life in an Ivory Basement,” Brown wrote: “The bottom line is this: when your data cost is decreasing faster than your hardware cost, the long-term solution cannot be to buy, rent, borrow, beg, or steal more hardware. The solution must lie in software and algorithms.”  

The Atlantic | Medical device, biotech and diagnostic companies account for about a third of all angel and venture capital investments. But today, this system is in collapse, jeopardizing the very foundation of what has made the U.S. health care system the envy of the modern world.

Bio-IT World | Expert Commentary | On Friday—after several years of seemingly dead-end discussions about reforming the patent system in the U.S.—President Obama signed the America Invents Law. The law generally is considered the most significant reform in U.S. patent law in the last 60 years, although many parties do not think it goes far enough.