Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

President Barack Obama officially has launched the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force, which will seek to address unnecessary regulatory barriers to developing new cancer treatments. Members of the task force — which will be chaired by Vice President Joe Biden — include the heads of the FDA, HHS, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.  The task force, funded by NIH, will present a report to the president before Dec. 31. Peter Pitts, president and founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner, said the president should ask HHS to appoint an innovation czar to make the most of resources. Read the White House memorandum here: www.fdanews.com/01-29-16-MoonshotCuresMemo.pdf .

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke is considering how next-generation genome sequencing (NGS) will be applied in studies of neurological disorders, and is asking researchers in this area for information about how they plan to use the latest sequencing tools and genomic data in their work. To find out how researchers aim to use next-gen whole genome sequencing (WGS), and what the needs are for sequencing, data storage, analysis, and annotation services, NINDS has released a new request for information seeking feedback from the extramural research community. NINDS will use this feedback to inform and complement its efforts to assess the current and future whole genome sequencing needs of researchers studying a wide range of neurologic disease, and conducting basic research into the nervous system, the genetics of the brain, cognition, brain plasticity, neural signaling, learning, memory, motor control, and other areas.

The tables turn, it's 23andMe's turn to send a letter to FDA... Continuing the story  Reading Between Lines   slapped with cease and desist  letters . Direct-to-consumer genomics firm 23andMe has sent a letter to the heads of the US Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health asking for a collaborative effort to develop guidelines for genetic testing. The firm  posted the letter  that it sent to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and NIH Director Francis Collins on its blog, The Spittoon, last night. 23andMe is one of several companies to be targeted recently by FDA, which  sent letters to several firms  saying that it believes the firms are selling unapproved diagnostic devices. The other firms that received letters were Knome, 23andMe, Decode Genetics, Navigenics, and Illumina, the last of which was cited for providing the tools that are used to provide genetic information to certain of the DTC genomics' customers. In the letter...

NIH Seeks Comments on Genetic Testing Registry The National Institutes of Health wants to hear what the public thinks about its planned Genetic Testing Registry (GTR), which will be a resource of information for healthcare providers and patients to learn about tests and labs, and for researchers and regulators to watch the genetic testing industry. NIH has opened a 30-day comment period on its GTR project, which will serve as a repository of information about genetic tests submitted by researchers, test developers, and manufacturers. The GTR will include information about how the tests are used, about their validity and utility, and about how they are accessed. The database, which is expected to be running in 2011, will be overseen by the NIH's Office of the Director, and it will be developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. "The registry will help consumers and health care providers determine the best options for genetic testing, which is becoming more...

- GSK becomes first company to freely share chemical structures on 13,500 molecules from its compound library - Alliances formed with leading scientific research communities from private industry and public-domain data provider courtesy CDD Blog GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had teamed up with leading public-domain data providers European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the US-based informatics service provider Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) to make freely available key scientific information on more than 13,500 compounds that could ultimately lead to new treatments for malaria. The release of this data marks the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made available the structures of so many compounds and is made possible through the collaboration of the web hosts and their specialist research tools, which will be available at no cost to researchers. The information, which is hosted on websites regularly used by researchers, incl...

Computercraft seeks a highly motivated Molecular Biologist to join the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) curation team onsite at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. GEO is the largest fully public repository for functional genomic data, primarily microarray and next-generation sequence datasets. More information on GEO can be found on the web site http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo . RESPONSIBILITIES: We are currently looking for someone with a background in molecular biology , genomics, or biomedicine that is capable of working with large datasets. This person will be a member of the GEO curation team, helping to review and process incoming data submissions. The successful candidate will work at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The successful candidate will perform the following tasks: - Review and evaluate data submissions for structural integrity and content. - Communicate extensively with rese...

Canada has started a national online archive that will house papers and data coming from government-funded research, and will be funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Modeled on the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central, the PubMed Central Canada resource was launched to provide Canadians with a free and open national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research funded by CIHR. PMC Canada was developed through a partnership between the National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), which will build the infrastructure and manage the repository, the US National Library of Medicine, and CIHR. The resource supports the Policy on Access to Research Outputs, which requires that CIHR grant recipients make their peer-reviewed publications freely accessible online within six months after they are published. "The global movement to provide barrie...

The Small Business Administration has decided to raise the amount of Small Business Innovation Research program grants in both phases, with Phase I awards increasing from $100,000 to $150,000, and Phase II awards rising from $750,000 to $1 million. In 2008, SBA initially considered making the increases in the grants in order to catch up with inflation. Following a comments period and analysis, the administration has decided to implement the increases. The current award value of $100,000 and $750,000 was originally set in 1992. SBA has the authority to increase the amount of the award every five years. SBA said in an announcement in the Federal Register that adjusting the threshold of awards up to $150,000 and $1 million "adequately offsets the general effects of inflation, maintains a degree of stability and simplicity to the threshold levels, and continues to provide participating agencies with an appropriate degree of flexibility in award size." In determin...

The National Institutes of Health has granted $67.4 million in funding for trailblazing research that could reap great benefits but which are not guaranteeing immediate results, including genomics and proteomics studies, NIH said Monday. The Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) program grants $200,000 per year for up to four years for researchers that test unconventional ideas or "tackle major methodological or technical challenges," according to NIH. Of the 56 grants, 10 researchers will receive a total of $10.6 million for two-year awards through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. "EUREKA awards reflect NIH's continued commitment to funding transformative research, even if it carries more than the usual degree of scientific risk," NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement. "The grants seek to elicit those 'eureka moments' when scientists make major theoretical or technical advances...

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...

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...

More good news for Bio, more so for Bioinfo & CompBio while the end of Jyly say House Passes Proposed 3 Percent NIH Funding Increase now NIH is really promoting Bio Science research to bring in a economic turn. The best of times is now ! A National Institutes of Health funding program will support exploratory research and development projects in informatics and computational biology that explore a range of areas, including genomics , medical genetics, proteomics , biomedical imaging, and a wide variety of other approaches. Funded through the National Cancer Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the other centers across NIH, the " Exploratory Innovations in Biomedical Computational Science and Technology " program will be coordinated by the NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative committee. Under the program, NIH will grant up to $275,000 over two years to academic institutes, small businesses, non-profits, state governments, ...

The US House of Representatives on Friday passed a 2010 budget for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education that would increase funding for the National Institutes of Health by nearly $1 billion over its appropriation for 2009. The bill, which passed the house by a vote of 264 to 153, seeks an NIH appropriation for 2010 of $30.97 billion, which is an increase of $940 million over the 2009 level, excluding funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That increase also would boost NIH funding by $500 million over the $30.5 million asked for by President Barack Obama in his budget request. The bill also seeks $6.8 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an increase of $67 million over the 2009 appropriation and $38.4 million over the White House's 2010 request. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which supports increased funding for biomedical research , said passage of the bill makes it more like...

The National Institutes of Health will allow the average award value of competing grants for fiscal 2008 to increase by three percent for fiscal 2009, in line with the three percent increase the institutes received under this year's budget appropriation from Congress, NIH said this week. NIH is predicting that this year's appropriation of $30.3 billion from the omnibus spending bill will allow its institutes and centers (ICs) to support approximately 9,800 new and competing research project grants. The ICs are expected to maintain the average number of new investigators as it did in the five most recent years, and to continue to use the NIH Director's Innovator Awards and the NIH Pathway to Independence awards within the common fund. The ICs also are expected to continue to use the NIH Director's Bridge Award Program, which gives continued but limited funding to meritorious investigators whose applications were close to the funding range of the relevant IC, but which ...

Life sciences will indeed receive a boost in funding in President-Elect Barack Obama's sprawling economic recovery plan, according to figures from the House Appropriations Committee released today. A statement from the committee says that the National Institutes of Health will get $2 billion, the National Science Foundation will receive $3 billion, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will get $462 million. As the 111th Congress squabbled over the finer points of the recovery package, science advocacy and trade organizations voiced their hopes and rallied their membership to ensure that research is not forgotten in the latest efforts to rally the flagging US economy. The figures put forth by the Appropriation Committee fall short of the wish lists put forth by many of these groups. The clearest voice clamoring for increased funding at government life science agencies has come from Research!America. The science advocacy group suggested that an infusion of $11.1 billion...

The United States Department of Agriculture has released the complete genetic sequences of 150 different avian influenza viruses and will make the information available through the National Institutes of Health’s GenBank. The USDA said on Friday that the sequencing data is part of the federal government’s Initiative on Avian Influenza, and that this information will be combined with studies that compare the viruses’ ability to infect poultry such as chickens, turkeys, and domestic ducks. This virus research that generated this data was conducted by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL), by the University of Georgia, the Ohio State University, the University of Delaware, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. "The project's ultimate goal is to sequence 900 avian influenza viruses from the SEPRL repository," David Suarez, a researcher with SEPRL, said in a statement. "These include avian influenza viruses col...

The CDD [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd.shtml ] and the its search tool [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/wrpsb.cgi ] has been recently updated. Also check out the latest approach for "automatically assigning subcellular locations" to protein from Newberg and Murphy [ http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jprobs/asap/abs/pr7007626.html ].

By activating a cancer suppressor gene, a small molecule called nutlin-3a can block cancer cell division, according to researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. This activation of the p53 gene leads to cellular senescence. An opportunity for new genetic mutations occurs each time a cell divides, so limiting the number of cell divisions in a cancer cell inhibits tumor progression. Activation of p53 can suppress tumor growth through more than one mechanism. It can interfere with the cell cycle, prompting a cell with unrepaired DNA damage to commit suicide through a complex signaling pathway called apoptosis. Alternatively, p53 may trigger cellular senescence in response to DNA damage or cellular stress. The expression of p53 is regulated by Mdm2, a protein that is overexpressed in several human cancers. Nutlins are small-molecule ...

Leading scientists discuss DNA database at April 7-8 Meeting For a quarter century, GenBank has helped advance scientific discovery worldwide. Established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1982, the database of nucleic acid sequences is one of the key tools that scientists use to conduct biomedical and biologic research. Since its creation, GenBank has grown at an exponential rate, doubling in size every 18 months. In celebration of this vital resource and its contribution to science over the last 25 years, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine (NLM), NIH, is holding a two-day conference on GenBank. The conference will take place April 7-8, 2008 at the Natcher Conference Center on the main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. For details on the meeting, see the conference Web site, at http://www.tech-res.com/GenBank25 . The conference is open to the public and also will be available via live and archived webcast; the April 7 proceedin...