Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

The nonprofit ECRI Institute has released a BRCA testing information guide for patients interested in learning more about the genetic risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. The guide comes in response to the growing concern and questions among women about the information their genes contain about the risk for cancer, after actress Angelina Jolie wrote an op-ed piece discussing her decision to get a double mastectomy as a result of carrying a BRCA1 mutation associated with heightened risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. There are reports that Jolie's highly publicized and controversial decision has caused a spike among women asking their physicians for BRCA testing. "People can get caught up in the headlines, which can lead to quick, uninformed decisions," says Vivian Coates, VP of information services and health technology assessment at ECRI Institute, in a statement. "Many women may find that after talking to their physicians about their ris...

                      -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-                         BI231 NGS Data Analysis                             June 24-28, 2013                       Online at Bioinformatics.Org          http://www.bioinformatics.org/wiki/BI231_NGS_Data_Analysis                    http://www.bioinformatics.org/edu/AGGT -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- OBJECTIVES: This course teaches biologists how to analyze data from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms. Topics to be covered include the description of sequencing strategies and platforms, experiment types, data format...

Qiagen said this week that it acquired Ingenuity Systems for $105 million in cash in order to offer its life science and clinical customers a complete and integrated workflow for its PCR- and next-generation sequencing-based molecular testing solutions — from sample preparation to data interpretation. Under its new parent, Ingenuity will continue to operate out of its offices in Redwood City, Calif., and retain all 120 current employees, while CEO Jake Leschly takes on new responsibilities within Qiagen's life science business unit. Ingenuity will also continue to develop and offer products under its existing licensing scheme. Its portfolio includes a knowledgebase of curated genomic variants; Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, its web-based application for modeling and analyzing biological pathways; Ingenuity Variant Analysis, which selects clinically relevant genomic variants from NGS data ( BI 1/13/2012 ); and Ingenuity iReport, its software for reporting the results of gene ...

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. has offered to pay about $13.6 billion to buy genetic testing equipment maker Life Technologies in a cash deal that will create a giant company serving research and specialty diagnostics. The Waltham, Mass., company said Monday it has agreed to pay $76 in cash for each share of Life Technologies, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif. Do you wish to know more?

Dako today said that the US Food and Drug Administration has approved two assays for use as companion diagnostics for a Genentech drug targeting HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. FDA simultaneously approved Dako's HercepTest and HER2 IQFISH pharmDx assays and Genentech's drug Kadcyla (ado-trastuzumab emtansine). Kadcyla is for patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who have been previously treated with Genentech's Herceptin (trastuzumab) and a taxane chemotherapy. Dako, an Agilent company, and Genentech, a Roche company, have been collaborating on the development of companion diagnostics for Genentech's drugs for a few years. In May 2012 the two firms inked a pact to collaborate on the FDA submission of Dako's assays for Kadcyla. A month later the HercepTest and HER2 FISH pharmDx were approved by FDA as companion diagnostics for Genentech's breast cancer drug Perjeta (pertuzumab). In late 2011, FDA gave the thumbs up to Dako's H...

Courtesy Genomeweb & Julia Karow   Studying for a dual degree in mathematics and molecular biology, Nick Tatonetti became interested in using computational models to study biology and make sense of its massive datasets. As a bioinformatics PhD student at Stanford, he developed new statistical models and computational approaches for analyzing drug effects and drug-drug interactions. At Columbia, Tatonetti is now focusing on molecular mechanisms of drugs. "We can actually think of each time a patient is being given a drug as an experiment," he says. "When the drug goes into the human system, it interacts molecularly, and then phenotypes come out of this system," which can be connected to molecular mechanisms in new ways. In particular, he is developing techniques that use clinical data to develop networks that highlight interactions between different systems in the human body, such as two organs. "And once we know that certain gene produc...

NextBio said this week that it is partnering with Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute and the Aflac Cancer Center to work on identifying biomarkers that can predict brain cancer metastasis in children, which will help clinicians determine which patients should receive radiation therapy. The partners will use NextBio Clinical software to analyze and interpret molecular and genomic data collected from children with medulloblastoma, a childhood brain tumor that affects around 500 children in the US every year and accounts for 20 percent of all brain cancers in children below the age of 19. Specifically, “this study will look at clinical and genomic data from real patients, as well as data from mouse models and frozen human tissue samples, and then will correlate these data sets with other data from the public domain,” Alpana Verma-Alag, NextBio’s head of clinical development, explained in a statement. Tobey MacDonald, director of Aflac’s brain tumor prog...