• The Right Drug the First Time

    Bio-IT World | Scientists in the growing field of pharmacogenetics believe that new DNA tests can protect patients from adverse drug responses and ineffective prescriptions. Yet it's been an uphill battle to convince payers, medical centers, and clinicians to embrace these tests in mainstream medicine.

    Mar 19, 2015

  • Ginkgo Bioworks Opens Its Genetic Engineering Foundry

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ginkgo Bioworks announced this morning that its synthetic biology “foundry,” an 18,000 square foot facility on the Boston waterfront designed to rapidly iterate through new prototypes of genetically modified organisms, is open for business.

    Mar 18, 2015

  • 23andMe Therapeutics Won't Change Drug Discovery

    Bio-IT World | 23andMe's new drug discovery unit isn't the next disruptive health innovation from Silicon Valley, but it is a good move for a company that should know better than anyone how to turn genetic data into real value.

    Mar 17, 2015

  • Tute Genomics Shares Genetic Variants Database on Google Genomics

    Bio-IT World | Google Genomics and Tute Genomics have announced that a Tute database of 8.5 billion annotations of genetic variants is publicly available through Google Genomics. The database will be hosted on Google Genomics, and can be queried at regular Google Genomics query rates.

    Mar 12, 2015

  • 23andMe Enters The Drug Business Just As Apple Changes It

    Forbes | 23andMe CEO and Founder Anne Wojcicki 23andMe, the Google-backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself. It's not just talk. The company has hired Richard Scheller, who led drug discovery at Genentech.

    Mar 12, 2015

  • Ewan Birney, Rolf Apweiler appointed Joint Directors of EMBL-EBI

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Ewan Birney and Rolf Apweiler have been appointed Joint Directors of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). They will assume their new roles with effect from 1 July 2015. Professor Dame Janet Thornton steps down after 14 years as the EMBL-EBI director.  

    Mar 11, 2015

  • Merck Serono Signs Up with Illumina's Universal Oncology Test

    Bio-IT World News Brief | Illumina has brought another major pharmaceutical partner on board for its Universal Oncology Test program, an effort to build a next-generation sequencing-based gene panel covering all major cancer-related mutations that could be used to select personalized therapies.

    Mar 10, 2015