• Oracle Software Supporting Moffitt’s Personalized Medicine Ambitions

    Apr 22, 2011, 01:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Moffitt Cancer Center recently announced that it selected Oracle Health Sciences solutions as the foundation for its next-generation health and research informatics platform. The groundbreaking partnership will support efforts by Moffitt’s longitudinal research initiative Total Cancer Care (TCC) to supply doctors of the future with a bedside decision-making tool for better matching patients to trials and treatments, says Mark Hulse, R.N., vice president, information technology and chief information officer at Moffitt Cancer Center.
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  • Hey, Where Did the Cloud Go?

    Apr 21, 2011, 11:05 AM by Michael Croft
    The Atlantic Wire | An outage at Amazon's cloud-based EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Web hosting service, reportedly affecting servers in Virginia, took down a number of popular social media sites, including Foursquare, Reddit, and Hootsuite.  
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  • Genome Sequencing in Clinic Leads to Life-Saving Cancer Treatment

    Apr 21, 2011, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft
    AFP | In another example of sequencing in the clinic, researchers at Washington University's Genome Institute have used a patient's genome to inform clinical decisions about leukemia treatment.
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  • The Value of Outsourcing Bioinformatics

    Apr 21, 2011, 01:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Guest Commentary | With reducing R&D budgets, revenue streams under threat from expiring drug patents, and general loss of consumer confidence, every biotech organization is faced with making difficult decisions about the future structure and purpose of R&D teams. Outsourcing is vital to the ongoing ability of bioinformatics teams to effectively support R&D activities within their organizations.
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  • Blueprint Medicines Target Cancer with Genomics

    Apr 20, 2011, 00:10 AM by Michael Croft

    Technology Review | Blueprint Medicines, which announced $40 million in funding from Third Rock Ventures, is planning to develop drugs designed to target cancer cells with genomics.  

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  • Computerized Brain Model

    Apr 19, 2011, 01:00 AM by Michael Croft

    Wall Street Journal | Scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science unveiled a $55 million computerized atlas of the brain last week thanks to funding from Microsoft. The atlas has cataloged 1,000 anatomical landmarks in two normal adult brains.  

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  • VIDEO: The $1,000 Genome

    Apr 19, 2011, 00:50 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World Video | Bio-IT World Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Davies, spoke last month at Harvard Medical School on the $1,000 Genome and genetics in medicine.
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  • Decoding Tumors in Search of More Effective Cancer Treatments

    Apr 18, 2011, 11:25 AM by Michael Croft
    LA Times | "Every tumor is telling its own story, its own history," says Kevin White, director of the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago, which is leading one of numerous national and international cancer genome projects.
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  • Bio-IT World Announces 2011 Best Practices Winners

    Apr 13, 2011, 13:20 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World—Bio-IT World magazine announced the winners of its seventh Best Practices Awards program this morning at an awards ceremony following the opening keynote at the 2011 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.
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  • Third Rock Bets $40 Million On Blueprint Medicines

    Apr 11, 2011, 11:25 AM by Michael Croft
    Boston Globe | Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures is pumping $40 million into Blueprint Medicines, a new company founded by the discoverers of Gleevec that will develop targeted therapies for cancer.
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  • Biomatters Adds New Algorithms

    Apr 11, 2011, 02:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Biomatters' Geneious Server has added several new algorithms and improved capabilities to easily offload high-intensity processing to computer clusters straight from researchers’ desktops. Combined with the user-friendly Geneious Pro desktop software, researchers will have a wider choice of algorithms and direct access to the full power of their institution’s computing grid or cluster. 
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  • Making Medical Treatment Claims Patent-Eligible Subject Matter After Prometheus v. Mayo: A Prescription for Success

    Apr 8, 2011, 00:25 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | Recently, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reaffirmed its earlier ruling on patentability of medical treatment methods in Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services, after remand from the United States Supreme Court, post-Bilski, which held that a method of hedging in the energy commodities as an unpatentable abstract idea. So what is the prescription for making a medical treatment patent-eligible subject matter, and why should you be interested?
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  • Complete Genomics Makes 29 Genome Public

    Apr 7, 2011, 02:15 AM by Michael Croft

    By Bio IT World Staff April 7, 2011 | Complete Genomics announced yesterday that it has added 29 high coverage, complete human genome sequences to its public genomic repository. Combined with the 40 genome datasets that Complete Genomics released on

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  • The State of Mutation Curation

    Apr 6, 2011, 09:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | It is a testament to David Cooper’s drive and perseverance that his Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD; www.hgmd.org) is the most comprehensive source of human mutation data currently available. “I hope it is a tremendous resource, because we’re not aware of any direct competitors,” says Cooper, a human molecular geneticist at Cardiff University’s Institute of Medical Genetics in Wales. 
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  • Wolfram Finds Few Answers Searching His Personal Genome

    Apr 5, 2011, 02:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | As part of his long-standing interest in making the world’s knowledge computable, Stephen Wolfram is taking a long look at model genomes, not least his own. Last year, the British science prodigy, CEO of Wolfram Research, and developer of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, had his own genome sequenced by Illumina. Wolfram recently spoke to Bio-IT World and offered a preview of his keynote at Bio-IT World Expo on April 12.
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  • Batter Up: A Stratified Approach to Rheumatoid Arthritis

    Apr 4, 2011, 03:50 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Mark Curran, senior director of immunology biomarkers at Centocor R&D, joined the organization five years ago and was tasked with a broad mission: to supply biomarkers to various compound-development teams and discovery R&D at Centocor R&D. Curran spoke with Bio•IT World managing editor, Allison Proffitt, about his vision for stratified medicine at Centocor R&D and the new Biomarkers of Anti-TNF Treatment Efficacy in Rheumatoid Arthritis-Unresponsive Populations (BATTER-UP) consortium announced in November.
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  • New Study Reveals 1 Million Human Genome Sequence Errors Across Two NGS Platforms

    Apr 1, 2011, 04:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | “What does it mean to have a ‘healthy’ genome?” That was the question that University of Utah geneticist Mark Yandell and colleagues set out to address in an important recent paper in the journal Genetics in Medicine. Among the key conclusions: there are 1.1 million discrepancies when the identical human genome sample is sequenced using two popular next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms.
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  • Carole Goble: Democratizing Informatics for the ‘Long Tail’ Scientist

    Mar 31, 2011, 07:50 AM by Michael Croft
    March 31, 2011 | In 1979, Carole Goble went to the University of Manchester to study computer science, and never looked back. She has helped create and/or develop a host of life science tools including Taverna, myExperiment, and BioCatalogue, all in the name of democratizing informatics. Goble recently spoke to Bio•IT World editor-in-chief Kevin Davies about her mission to democratize informatics for life sciences. 
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  • Bioinformatics for Traditional Chinese Medicine

    Mar 30, 2011, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft
    Wall Street Journal | University of Sydney computer scientist researchers are using new technology to investigate old treatments. The researchers are using algorithms to determine the efficacy of Chinese herbal treatments using data supplied by the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing.
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  • Cray Supercomputer Planned for 20 Petaflops

    Mar 28, 2011, 00:35 AM by Michael Croft
    Tech Eye | Cray will construct a new supercomputer, dubbed Titan, that will be able to achieve 20 petaflops, far above the 2.5 petaflop record currently held by the Chinese Tianhe-1A.
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