New York Times | Pfizer's patent on Lipitor expires in November, representing a $10 billion/year revenue stream for the drug maker.

Bio-IT World | Following in the footsteps of Novartis, Merck and other big pharma companies that have decided to headquarter their research operations in the Boston area, EMD Serono recently opened a new research facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica.

Bio-IT World | NCBI has announced that it will discontinue its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories for high-throughput sequence data and the Pepidome Repository, citing budgetary constraints. 

Bio-IT World Expert Commentary | Pharmaceutical companies are drowning in data, but few organizations know what to do about it. That’s about to change. A new information governance strategy that supports “defensible data disposal” can help companies reduce the amount of data they retain. By doing so, they can utilize research data more efficiently, improve compliance processes, reduce legal and business risk, and save money.

Bio-IT World | Microsoft is extending a mobile challenge to the health and life sciences marketplace, and calling partners, developers and phone app enthusiasts to come up with unique apps coded for Windows Phone  7 (WP7) that will benefit their organizations, employees or consumers.

Bio-IT World | SAN FRANCISO—Genedata today released Genedata Biologics, a first-in-class, off-the-shelf software solution for comprehensive data management and analysis of biologics R&D activities. The platform is featured at CHI’s Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference 2011 in San Francisco this week (Moscone Convention Center, Feb. 23-25).

Forbes | IBM's Watson not only soundly beat two Jeopardy champions, but also may have ushered in a new era of computing, the third in IBM's long history.

Computerworld | President Obama has included supercomputing in his 2012 budget proposal. If the budget is approved, the Department of Energy will get $126 million for development of an exascale computing system.

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.