Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Becton Dickinson has signed a definitive agreement to acquire molecular diagnostics firm HandyLab for an undisclosed sum. HandyLab sells the Jaguar molecular diagnostics system, which incorporates clinical sample preparation, nucleic acid extraction, microfluidic real-time PCR amplification and detection. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based firm launched the system in November 2008. BD said that it plans to place its BD GeneOhm assays for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , Clostridium difficile , and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus on the HandyLab platform and market them as the new BD Max system. The acquisition follows an alliance between the firms begun earlier this year aimed at placing the GeneOhm tests on the Jaguar system. "We believe this new platform enables both our healthcare-associated infections offering and future expansion into other molecular opportunities," BD President Vincent Forlenza said in a statement. BD said that it will provide more informati...

Was going through a recent blog on indiblogger about the NASSCOM Product Conclave . Where this time is themed and focused on SAAS & related services. In the recent times SAAS or Software as a Service has even captured the attention of Life Science and biomedical community globally. Indian Life Sciences Informatics Company, Molecular Connections' year old SAAS product startup is www.XTractor.in . In July 2008 came of with a commercial version of the product XTractor Premium- expert curated biomedical discovery, analysis and knowledge modeling platform, based on semantic curation and annotation of biomedical facts from PubMed . Has very handy analytics to search and narrow down the most relevant facts, build and discover relationships between biomedical facts check out some of the user CaseStudies . XTractor Premium knowledgebase currently contains 302,269 relationships categorized on 24 categories Gene-Gene , Gene-Drug , Gene-Disease , Gene-Process , Gene-Mutation/Polymorphis...

DEPARTMENT OF BIOTECHNOLOGY Ministry of Science and Technology Govt of India TRANSLATIONAL HEALTH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE (Autonomous Institute and Part of NCR Bio-medical Science Cluster) Present location at the National Institute of Immunology JNU Complex, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND DEANS XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery , knowledge sharing, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis Innovative Features like Semantic Search , Concept Linking , Bibliographic search , Save, Export and Visualize Only Knowledgebase with daily updations from PubMed XTractor Premium now at an Special Introductory Offer. Subscribe now and save! Request for a Trial

Entrez gene is the most widely used data resource for Gene based information worldwide. To enable researchers to obtain high quality manually annotated information from XTractor when they search for a Gene on Entrez Gene, we are now providing direct links from Entrez Gene records to corresponding Gene Reports in XTractor. To use this outlinked option- when in Entrez Gene, for any human gene select the “Link Out” option from the Display menu in Entrez Gene and click on the XTractor link. You will be taken directly to the XTractor graphical report for the Gene of interest and also manually annotated facts on the associated Diseases, Drugs and the Biological Processes for the Gene. http://www.xtractor.in/ncbiSearch.do?xid=XT_15377&symbol=BRCA1 XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery , knowledge sharing, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis Innovati...

The National Institutes of Health has awarded 970 stimulus grants worth more than $625 million — around 14 percent of total NIH stimulus grant funding to date — to projects that fall within the broad family of 'omics disciplines, according to a preliminary analysis of the NIH funding database conducted by GenomeWeb Daily News . As of Sept. 30, the close of the fiscal year, the National Institutes of Health had awarded a total of $5 billion in stimulus funding — nearly half of the $10 billion appropriation that NIH will disburse over two years under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 . The $5 billion figure includes both grants and contracts, however. For grants alone, NIH had awarded approximately $4.4 billion via 12,789 ARRA grants as of Oct. 7, according to the database. The 970 grants awarded to 'omics projects comprise 7.5 percent of the stimulus grants awarded so far, but the total funding awarded to these projects makes up 14 percent of NIH ARRA grant ...

The National Institutes of Health has awarded more than 12,000 grants totaling around $5 billion so far under the economic recovery and stimulus package, the White House said today. President Barack Obama commuted to Bethesda this morning to announce the funding as a milestone, to unveil a $175 million grant for cancer genomics, and to tour the NIH campus. In late-morning speeches before a crowd of NIH staff, President Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and NIH Director Francis Collins loosely outlined how the $5 billion in grants over two years — nearly half of NIH’s total $10 billion appropriation under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — will stimulate research and create jobs. A number of genomics-focused programs will be funded under the stimulus package, including $175 million over two years for The Cancer Genome Atlas, a joint effort between the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Cancer Institute, according to a fact...

“ … LigerCat is a search tool for NCBI’s PubMed that uses tag clouds to provide an overview of important concepts and trends. LigerCat aggregates multiple articles in PubMed , summing their MeSH descriptors and presenting them in a cloud, weighted by frequency “. LigerCat is an abbreviation for Literature and Genomics Resource Catalog , which is a free PubMed search tool developed in 2009 as part of the Biology of Aging project at the MBLWHOI Library at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory . LigerCat is great news for geneticists or anyone involved in translational research, a fairly effortless means of data mining for dynamic links to a very complex literature. LigerCat can be used to search in several ways: 1) to locate and select a list of individual journal titles indexed in PubMed , 2) search using terms from the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) list , 3) search using keywords, 4) search on Genes found in the NCBI database...