Bio-IT World Comment | Challenges are not new to the pharmaceutical industry. Will pharmaceutical companies get a break in 2011? What are the trends that are impacting the pharmaceutical industry? Here are our predictions for 2011.

Forbes | NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz talks about some of the challenges of cloud storage, how it changes business models and consolidation in the technology industry.

Forbes | Sanofi-Aventis has agreed to buy Cambridge-based Genzyme for $74 a share, valuing the biotech at $20.1 billion.

NGS Leaders | Bio-IT World Editor Kevin Davies reports from Marco Island and the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference on Ion Torrent, Baylor, SOLiD's "sweet spot", PacBio, Illumina, and more.

HHMI | Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have used next-generation DNA sequencing tools to identify a mutation in a gene that underlies one of the most common forms of severe hypertension.

Bio-IT World | Mike Wilkinson, CIO and executive vice president at PPD, has a message for pharma: “We’re in this together as partners; we’re not a vendor anymore. I think we need to move away from that kind of transactional approach where all they’re looking for is to have a vendor and buy a service. That’s not going to work in this environment.”

Bio-IT World | Guest Commentary | In 2010, the high performance and high throughput computing (HPC/HTC) communities saw two major technologies go mainstream: the use of general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPU or just GPUs) and Cloud computing.

Bio-IT World | A former senior executive at Wyeth for many years, followed by spells at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Susan Ward has spent the past eight years translating her detailed appreciation of the R&D process for numerous clients, helping companies translate technology into products. “Ask any CIO in the drug industry what keeps him/her up at night, and it won’t be too many sentences before the ‘value’ issue comes up,” says Ward.

Bio-IT World | Toward the end of 2010, two systems biology (SB) pioneers, GNS Healthcare (formerly Gene Network Sciences) and Selventa (formerly Genstruct), underwent name changes and took major steps to reposition and grow their businesses. Time will judge the effectiveness of the moves. Today, the systems biology label seems mostly forgotten while its tenets live on, and perhaps that was to be expected.

Bio-IT World | Nicholas Giannasi is VP Life Sciences Product Strategy, sitting within Oracle’s Health Sciences global business unit, covering clinical development and safety. At Oracle, Giannasi has responsibility for the requirements, design, and direction of some 46 eClinical and safety products, including the recently acquired Phase Forward. Giannasi offered Bio•IT World chief editor Kevin Davies an overview of Oracle’s clinical offerings and aspirations, as well as steps to guard against complacency.

Bio-IT World | A small software company formed by a group of former IBM staffers is breathing new life into semantic technologies. But don’t look for Cambridge Semantics to harp on the term. “The world of people well versed in semantic technology is still quite small,” says co-founder Lee Feigenbaum. “It’s important that anyone working with our software should not be IT... We can’t build our software without these technologies, but we’ve no interest in preaching that you’re using semantics.”

Bio-IT World | Becky Kush believes we still have work to do on clinical trials. The president and CEO of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) says, “We haven’t done the real transformational move yet that’s really new and different. And the process is broken.”

Bio-IT World | SHENZHEN, CHINA—Tianjian Chen, an architect in BGI’s computing platform group and a key engineer in the development of BGI’s new cloud computing resource, is 26 years old. No wonder his colleagues call him the “old man” of the team. 

Bio-IT World | An assortment of emerging clinical trial technologies over the past decade are providing creative ways for pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations (CROs) to boost the quality, pace, and efficiency of their drug development programs. The promise is sporadically realized by companies that selectively and appropriately apply these tools and use timely and visible performance metrics as the basis for relationship-building with clinical investigators. Working recipes are not often diligently followed, however. Thus clinical trials performance, in the main, remains dreadful.

Bio-IT World | On April 12-14, Bio•IT World will host its tenth annual conference. All signs point to this being the biggest and most exciting event yet, with two new conference tracks added by popular demand, bringing the total to nine; more than a dozen pre-conference workshops; and a record number of exhibitors. All the regular highlights are there as well, including the 2011 Best Practices Awards dinner, the Benjamin Franklin Award (presented by Bioinformatics.org), and the Best of Show exhibit prizes. Here are just a few of the potential highlights.

Bio-IT World | It’s hardly an all-out media blitz, but Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) has finally sneaked the first details of its next-generation sequencing playbook, a highly configurable prototype sequencing system dubbed GridION. 

Bio-IT World | RainDance Technologies closed a $37.5 million Series D financing. According to the company, RainDance will use the funding to drive new applications for its commercial targeted sequencing and sequence enrichment solution in the medical genetics and research markets, as well as grow the company's global sales and support infrastructure.