Will Max-Seq Gain Traction?

      At the beginning of the month, I had dinner with J Adams from Azco Biotech and some friends/colleagues of his and talked over the Max-Seq.   And yes, I did let them pick up the bill -- J wouldn't let me pay for myself.  In Sequence did a nice piece on it the next week, so again I've blown an opportunity to scoop them.  Then somehow, between vacations and other distractions, this piece was stuck in blogger limbo.  But, there are some details I don't see there and some color I think worth adding.

Wishing I Had Been A Referee: A Renaissance for Tagamet?

Back from vacation & watching another wave of Hurricane Irene soak the area (curiously, the windiest times so far seem to be breaks in the rain).  August has not seen much attention paid to this space (indeed, I have one piece that has gestated nearly the whole month), so time to put the shoulder to the wheel.

 

Just before my vacation, a pair of papers showed up in Science Translational Medicine which describe two attempts at drug re-positioning by transcriptional profiling.  The key concept is to take expression profiles for diseases and try to find drugs which appear to generate the opposite transcriptional pattern, with the theory that the drug could nudge the disease pattern back to a normal state.  This is an idea which has been kicking around for a while, and at one time was the focus of a number of companies.  One was even trying to re-position a drug I have a small connection to (MLNM developed it from a target I spotted in an EST library), but I believe that is a dead effort.  One challenge in tracking this field is that it is rarely obvious what happened in the end; did a drug fail to pan out or did the backers just run out of cash?

Names in Collision

I will claim that I saw this coming, in that I've toyed with the basic skeleton of this post before.  But, I hadn't gotten around to it -- but how could I miss this opportunity.  On a mailing list devoted to SAM, someone asked about a related topic to SAM, and one of the experts on the board replied with an electronic head-scratching

Ion Throws A Long Punch At MiSeq

The benchtop sequencer wars are heating up!  Illumina and Life are engaged in a fierce war of pamphlets and datasets to convince the world that they have the edge.  I won't attempt to give a complete play-by-play, but hit on the latest developments, which includes Ion releasing a dataset of 250+ bp reads.