Consumer genomics in NY Times

GenomeQuest could have  targeted consumers, the largest available market for its technology. When we entered the market in 2004, the consumer wave was a distant vision, not even on the horizon. How did we survive? We targeted the smallest segment we could find: Information Scientists and Biotech Patent Lawyers. Why? My father was a old-school ...

MassDevice: Ethics of Personal Genomes

Brad Perriello at MassDevice interviewed me and posted the article in their popular e-newsletter on the medical device industry. You can read the interview here. Brad caught me a little off guard when he asked me what I considered to be the ethical implications of individuals having access to their genomes. In a couple ...

Small step for Personalized Medicine

An article by Nicholas Wade, science writer for the New York Times Disease Cause Is Pinpointed With Genome describes two research teams who have independently sequenced the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. A fantastic research blog post at Genetic Future titled Disease hunting ...

Next-Gen Sequencing in 2010

Brilliant analytical overview of Next-Generation Sequencing machines compiled by Dan Koboldt at MassGenomics from the recent AGBT event in Marco Island. And another by Boonsri Dickinson at SmartPlanet The amazing race for the cheapest and fastest DNA machine.

Developers Wanted

Today, we launched our API’s for Sequence Data Management on the cloud. So what? GenomeQuest is now for bioinformatics and computational biologists (we call them developers for short). These are people who prefer to write code in Unix, and prefer awk, perl, and sed to Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Chrome. So why is that important? With no ...

An SDM Cloud?

Executives in the industry sometimes ask me if we are moving our software to the “cloud”. When I say we are already a cloud, then they wonder: “then what is Amazon offering?” Its helpful to think of the cloud as a layered architecture. The VC Bessemer provides a nice definition of this layering. Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Web-services ...

“Watson meets Moore”

The title of the article on the new $50,000 ION Torrent machine by Kevin Davies at Bio-IT World says it all: "Watson meets Moore" as Ion Torrent Introduces Semiconductor Sequencing

Xconomy covers GQ

Ryan McBride from Xconomy posted this nice article on GQ yesterday. After our discussion, he asked me if the "Google of Genomics" metaphor applied and I did not deny, thus the title: "GenomeQuest Wants to Be the Google of DNA Data Searches"

Gene patents on trial

GenomeWeb reports on the HHS Advisory groups proposal to "limit the ability of holders of gene patents to keep others from using those genes for diagnostic and research purposes." The GLR recaps the evolution of the debate and the sponsors an interesting dialog in a recent post Up Next in Gene ...

Programming the cloud

If you are a developer or a technical type, this one is for you. Over at Depth-First there is a blog post about an application in the cheminformatics field: PubCouch: Streams aren't just for Pipeline Pilot. The author illustrates how a well abstracted Web service avoids the costly database Extract-Transform-Load operations so familiar ...