Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Agilent Technologies has inked a definitive agreement to acquire Varian for $52 per share, or a total of around $1.5 billion. The acquisition is Agilent's largest in the life sciences space and continues a strategy by the firm to focus on that segment and its "transformation into a leading bio-analytical measurement company. The deal will expand Agilent's presence in the life sciences research and applied markets, such as the environment and energy. Agilent said that it also will expand its product portfolio into atomic and molecular spectroscopy and in other fields including nuclear magnetic resonance, imaging, and vacuum technologies. "This acquisition is a major step in Agilent's transformation into a leading bio-analytical measurement company," Agilent President and CEO Bill Sullivan said in a statement. "The combination of Varian with Agilent's bio-analytical measurement business will result in the broadest product offering in the industry....

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...

Published Literature findings act as a key driver for decision making in drug discovery and biotechnology industry. Majority of the researchers prefer PubMed for published literature since it is a free resource for dissemination of scientific information. Data mining biomedical information from PubMed has been a long-standing problem for many researchers across the globe. On an average more than 50,000 scientific abstracts get published in PubMed every month and for a researcher it is a highly time consuming task to pick the most relevant abstracts everyday and annotate them accurately for research purposes. Though many text mining NLP (Natural Language Processing) engines are used to address this problem, manually annotated data has its own advantages in terms of accuracy and quality of the data that is captured. However, one of the major disadvantages with manual data mining still happens to be the processing time and its cost intensive nature. So the need arises for a system, which ...

Is Facebook a phenomenon — or a fad? In the two years since Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, more than 300,000 Facebook applications, or "apps," have been created — games, quizzes, digital gifts and more. The successful apps boost users' engagement with Facebook — sometimes called "stickiness" — but do not directly provide revenue. Piggybacking on Facebook has been profitable for several startups. Zynga, which according to some reports is raking in annual revenues of $100 million with the poker game Texas Hold'em and other games, has grown from 45 employees to more than 250 in the past year, Pincus said. About "70 percent, perhaps 80 percent" of Zynga's growth, he said, could be attributed to Facebook. Flixster's growth also illustrates Facebook's role as a driver of Web innovation. Founded in January 2006, Flixster.com was attracting about 4 million monthly unique visitors when Facebook opened its development ...

CambridgeSoft's Business Partner in Kochi, India is hiring for multiple positions. If you know any appropriate candidates, with a chemistry or biochemistry background. The following is a list of available positions: Team Lead - coordinating the activities of small software development teams: http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=115 3D Team Leader : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=228 Developer - Network Communications and Distributed Computing : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=230 Developer Numerical Methods: http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=234 Senior Lead Developer : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=225 Scientific Software Developer C++ : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=14 Lead Developer E-Notebook : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/details/?Career=81 E-Notebook Enterprise Support Analyst : http://www.cambridgesoft.com/careers/de...

There's a great deal of wisdom in a crowd, but how do you listen to a thousand people talking at once? Identifying the wants, needs, and knowledge of internet users can be like listening to a mob. In the Web 2.0 era, leveraging the collective power of user contributions, interactions, and feedback is the key to market dominance. A new category of powerful programs and web based technology lets you discover the patterns, inter-relationships, and individual profiles-the collective intelligence, locked in the data people leave behind as they surf websites, post blogs, and interact with other users. XTractor Premium is one such initiative, epitome of Collective Intelligence in Action for bio medical data. Implemens collective intelligence concepts of vital data gathering and mining techniques like analyzing trends, discovering relationships, and making predictions. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches ...

Industry response to the H1N1 pandemic suggests that cell culture vaccine production is about to come of age with two firms that use the technique, Novartis and Baxter, claiming it will cut development and manufacturing timelines by months. Margaret Chan officially declared the pandemic explaining that H1N1 infections worldwide can no longer be traced and that “ further spread is considered inevitable .” She asked drugmakers to begin preparing for large-scale H1N1 vaccine production when manufacture of seasonal stocks is completed, prompting a flurry of industry updates from vaccine producers. Baxter and Novartis aim for early availability The most eye-catching of these responses came from US drugmaker Baxter which announced it has completed testing of its Celvapan H1N1 vaccine and is “ now in full-scale production ,” and is working to deliver it as early as next month. Traditionally, seasonal influenza vaccines are mass produced using the albumin found in fertilised hens eggs a...