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. 

BrianMadden.com | DataCore Software has announced benchmark results and a research paper reporting less than $35 per desktop for platform hardware and a total system cost of less than $70 per vDesktop for all hardware and software.

New York Times | The government's new drug development center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, isn't intended to be comptetitive with the private sector, says NIH director Francis Collins. The center is slated to open in October and will be one of the 27 centers and institutes under the National Institutes of Health.

Seattle Times | Pfizer is paying $632 million in a research collaboration with Theraclone Sciences, a Seattle-based biotech working on antibody drugs for cancer and infectious diseases.

Bio-IT World | Bio-IT World is announcing a deadline extension for its 2010 Best Practices awards program. In keeping with extensions given in previous years, the 2011 extended deadline is February 4.

Bio-IT World Expert Commentary | New details of the health information technology (HIT) permanent certification program have been released, and it appears that the federal government will be leaning heavily on the private sector to oversee the electronic health records (EHR) certification process.

Reuters | Several announcements recently have illustrated that drugmakers are seeing money in generics. Merck just struck a deal with Parexel to create biosimilars.  

Bio-IT World | An important Scripps study on consumer attitudes to personal genomics testing, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that most individuals are perfectly capable of handling genome-wide data, and may help counter much of the mythology that has arisen surrounding the public's supposed inability to handle personal genetic information.  

Bio-IT World | The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and Complete Genomics have signed an agreement that calls for Complete Genomics to sequence 615 complete human genome samples as part of an ISB study on neurodegenerative diseases.

Forbes.com | Illumina is launching a smaller, more affordable next-generation sequencing machine, the MiSeq, which will cost $125,000 and will provide some competition for the newly released Personal Genome Machine from Ion Torrent.

Comment | The contract research market grew 13% in 2009, reaching $23.5 billion, according to the Contract Research Annual Review 2010 report. But as these partnerships with contract research organizations become more common, it will become essential for firms to establish collaborative communications with their partners. A partner portal, connecting the sponsor with the CRO, is an effective platform to achieve these goals.