The Cross-Border Biotech Blog

Biotechnology, Health and Business in Canada, the United States and Worldwide

Tag Archives: genomics

Friday Science Review: June 11, 2010

Catch up on these genetics stories between World Cup soccer games… Genetic Links to Autism: Phase 2 results of the Autism Genome Project mapping the genetics of autism is reported this week in Nature. Researchers used the latest microarray technology to identify a trend that autism patients carry more insertion and deletion mutations affecting their [...]

X-Prize Ventures Further Into Biology: Millions May Be Up for Grabs for New Organs from Stem Cells and New Doctors from Software

A story in FierceBiotech reports that the X Prize Foundation, most famous for incentivizing Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, is considering a “stem cell” prize that would award $10 million to “the first team to be able to create a lung, liver, or heart from the stem cell of a patient who is terminal, have that new organ transplanted into [...]

Friday Science Review: February 19, 2010

Hunks and pigs highlight this week’s research wrap-up… HUNKs Stop Cancer Metastasis: Researchers screening tumour cells found that expression of the enzyme HUNK (Hormonally Up-regulated Neu-associated Kinase) is significantly lower in cancers.  When they reconstituted HUNK into metastatic cancer cells, it decreased their metastastic potential when tested in mouse cancer models.  Its actions block the [...]

Friday Science Review: December 11, 2009

WOW!  A busy week in the bioscience world… Pull Down Your ‘SOCS’ and Grow Some Nerves: A long standing question is how to get mature neurons, which stop growing at around the age of two, to start growing again after sustaining nerve damage.  The answer may lie in a protein called SOCS3 (suppressor of cytokine [...]

Friday Science Review: December 4, 2009

Universal Cancer Signalling Pathway: This is an interesting new twist on cancer signalling that may make scientists rethink how to tackle the disease.  It is thought that there is no single cure for cancer as the hetergenous disease may arise from mutations in a number of different pathways.  In this report, however, researchers demonstrate that [...]

Friday Science Review: November 20, 2009

Intestinal disease genomics and how hedgehogs cause arthritis… Genetic Clues to ‘Belly Aches’ in Children: The largest genomic investigation into early onset inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis involved the efforts of an international research team.  In total, genetic information from 3,400 children with IBD and 12,000 healthy children were compared.  [...]

Friday Science Review: October 23, 2009

A lucky find and two very different genomics projects… Connective Tissue Disorder Linked to Defects in Ltbp4:  A McGill University researcher collaborating on two independent projects, one from Washington University School of Medicine and the other from New York University School of Medicine, made the coincidental link between the two after realizing that the tissue [...]

Friday Science Review: October 9, 2009

Breast cancer, genomics and two cover stories in prestigious journals… Cancer Evolution and Progression:  Scientists at the BC Cancer Agency have sequenced and compared the entire cancer genome of a metastatic tumour versus the primary breast tumour that originated nine years earlier.  They used next generation DNA sequencing technology to reveal 32 mutations in the [...]

In Praise of Universal Coverage From a Genomics Perspective

This could be the last chance in the U.S. to make good decisions about health care.  Why? Because now, before genome sequencing is fast and cheap and universal, we are in a political position rarely experienced outside philosophy books: we are still in the “original position,” behind the “veil of ignorance.”  I’ll try to make this [...]

I’ll Drink To That: Genome BC and Genome Canada Launch $3.4 million Grape and Wine Genomics Project

A team of researchers in British Columbia (UBC, SFU), Ontario (Guelph) and elsewhere (NRC, USDA) will be studying grapes and yeast to bring molecular techniques to bear on winemaking.  Ultimately, they aim to produce a hand-held device to “help growers monitor proteins in the vine or berry at any time” (a “vine-corder”?) that will be [...]

New York Times’ Brody Counsels DTC Genomics Caution

An article in yesterday’s New York Times calls direct-to-consumer genetic testing, a trend we are following on this blog, ”fraught with potential dangers.”  Although our original post on the subject discussed many of the regulatory and ethical issues around DTC genomics, Brody’s article raises some interesting additional points: The risk of false reassurance: “a man told he [...]

Pfizer and Ontario BIP Program Funding New $6.9 million “POP-CURE” Project for Colorectal Cancer Genomics

Pfizer Global Research and Development is contributing $6 million and the Ontario government is contributing $900,000, through the Biopharmaceutical Investment Program (BIP), for a new project “to discover and validate new targets for the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of colorectal cancer.”  Brad Wouters, a Senior Scientist with the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) and a Senior Investigator [...]

BIO 2009: Ontario Premier’s Breakfast

The speeches (s-peach-es?) just finished this morning at the Ontario Premier’s breakfast. Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson announced that Ontario has recently completed 2 new BIP investments: a Pfizer collaboration with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR); and GSK Canada for manufacturing in Mississauga. Ontario’s Premier — Dalton McGuinty, winner of BIO’s [...]

University of Guelph and Vineland Launch New Ontario Partnership for Applied Genomics, Consumer and Horticulture Research

The University of Guelph and the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre signed a “research partnership agreement” that will develop new products and ideas “ranging from new fruit cultivars with health-boosting antioxidants to wider food choices at the supermarket.” The collaboration will focus on three main areas: Applied genomics to help increase yield and resist disease; [...]

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