Cancer-testing company Myriad Genetics is back in the courts again. In a long-running piece of legislation, the Supreme Court today agreed to hear arguments about the validity of Myriad’s patents covering isolated DNA of the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Read more
In a battle that will shape the market for DNA sequencing services, sequencing company Complete Genomics has received letters from rival suitors. Illumina, a dominant supplier of high-throughput DNA sequencing machines, and BGI, a giant sequencing services firm, have both offered to purchase Complete Genomics, which has highly accurate, proprietary technology for sequencing human genomes. Read more
If parents have a son’s genes sequenced in hopes of explaining extreme muscle weakness, should they also be told whether he is likely to get Alzheimer’s disease as an adult? Should the child be told? When? How do answers to these questions shift for currently healthy adults? And should people be given more or less information depending on what they want to know? Read more
Bioinformaticians love contests. There are competitions for how best to pick gene expression that signals disease, to foretell how a protein will fold, to assemble genomes, and to predict how mutations affect protein function. By comparing different approaches to solving the same problem, better solutions can be developed. Read more
As geneticists gather in San Francisco, sequencing companies are strutting their stuff. Oxford Nanopore drew crowds by displaying its sleek, cheap machines that promise to disrupt the market place – but the company remains coy about when exactly it will release data or start taking orders. Pacific Biosciences has announced advances in its sequencing chemistry. And Illumina unveiled cloud-based collaborations to help turn raw data into information. Read more
If the information Myriad Genetics has collected about breast cancer mutations remains proprietary, costs of gene tests could increase while quality declines, argues Robert Cook-Deegan, a policy researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In a paper published today in the European Journal of Human Genetics, Cook-Deegan and co-authors John Conley, James Evans, and Daniel Vorhaus urge health-care payers and policy makers to encourage the company to share clinical data and proprietary algorithms. Read more
The man in the bowtie says he can transform you into anyone you want. At the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is applying his ‘experimental philosophy’ to epigenetics, one of the hottest and most rapidly advancing fields in biology. The art exhibit opened this weekend. Read more
This week, the scientific review committee of a state-funded initiative for cancer research resigned over concerns about peer review. The move follows a series of troubles at the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) that began earlier this year, when CPRIT leaders approved an $18-million grant that did not go through peer review and awards of peer-reviewed grants were delayed. CPRIT’s chief scientific officer, Nobel Laureate Alfred Gilman announced his resignation in protest in May, and CPRIT executives vowed to implement changes ensuring the integrity of its grant procedures. (See Nature’s Grant review opens up Texas-sized rift) … Read more
Medical and graduate students will get the chance to sequence and interpret their own genomes in what is being billed as the first-ever course to offer whole-genome sequencing. Read more