Friday, February 12, 2016

Weekly Links February 12th, 2016



“MUST READ”
    • Craig Venter, multi-millionaire maverick, says he can help you live a better, longer life. Roger Highfield asks how.
DISRUPTION, REVOLUTION
The Top Ten Stories in Genetics, 2015: A Bacterial Editing System Goes Viral Genetic modification was not invented in 2015. DNA was edited before CRISPR/Cas 9, just as books were printed before the Gutenberg Bible. Is it crazy to compare CRISPR to t…
tags: Pocket weeklylinks

The Next Next Thing in Sequencing “Nanopores may soon help revolutionize the fields of DNA and protein sequencing,” asserts Derek M. Stein, Ph.D., associate professor of physics and engineering, Brown University.
    • A revolutionary DNA sequencing instrument which could help break the chain of transmission of viruses such as Ebola and Zika has been developed by British scientists.
    • The pocket-sized MinION device was developed by an Oxfordshire science company, and results published on Wednesday in the journal Nature show it was able to help identify the unique genetic sequence of the Ebola virus in patients within 24 hours.

    • The early signs for Editas, which will trade under the ticker symbol “EDIT,” are good. The company sold 5.9 million shares at $16 apiece, in line with the projections it set last week. That means Editas has raised $94.4 million and is valued at close to $600 million right off the bat, even though it’s still likely a year away from testing its first experimental treatment in a human clinical trial.
TOOLS/TECHNIQUES
Synthetic Biology Primer: In Conversation With Richard Kitney, Part 1 “Synthetic biology” has always been a puzzling term to me. Prosthetic limbs are synthetic. Knee replacements are synthetic. Splicing the gene from one organism into another, a pra…
    • Optimization of cell culture parameters is a vital part of biotherapeutic process development, but it is not without its challenges. One such challenge is the selection of a scalable and appropriate cell culture feed that can work in combination with the established cell line and a given base medium to achieve the desired titer and growth characteristics.
HEALTH/MEDECINE
Dr. David Spetzler on Clinical Sequencing Dr. Spetzler, Chief Scientific Officer at Caris Life Sciences, will be a speaker at the upcoming Personalized Medicine World Conference Silicon Valley.
    • Major UK research institutions have outlined a twenty-year cancer research future for London. The London Cancer Hub is intended to become a world-leading life science campus that, according to plans published today, will potentially create 13,000 jobs and deliver at last two extra cancer drugs every five years.
COMPANIES
·         blogs.nature.com
The markets may be softening on biotech, but overall the sector remains in an incredibly strong environment.Biotech has been witnessing the greatest five-year bull run in the industry’s history. The optimism for the sector and for new biomedical product innovation has manifested itself across the public and private markets, fundraising metrics, initial public offerings (IPOs) and secondary offerings and partnering activity. A quick review of the summary data underscores that exuberance:
Eight Things You Might Not Have Known Until Editas Filed Its S-1 Here’s a CRISPR first: Editas Medicine of Cambridge, MA, has filed paperwork for an IPO. Its S-1 document became public today, marking the first one from a company working to turn the …
    • Most Big Pharma have their own program. Boehringer-Ingelheim for example is partnering with BioMedX to run a new program with researchers from Heidelberg. Now the 3rd largest Pharma company in France, Pierre Fabre, has also made a move into the field.
Pierre Fabre will accompany its biotech and research laboratories specialized in oncology and dermatology, primarily in France and Europe. This program aims to speed up the development process of new molecules from preclinical to clinical phases, and will last between 12 and 24 months.





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