Category: Genetics

MEwens
Roche CEO Severin Schwan recently sat down with the WSJ’s Jonathan Rockoff to discuss a wide range of topics — including the Swiss pharma giant’s recent bid for gene-sequencing company Illumina.
Among the highlights:
Schwan says Roche expects that longer-term, gene sequencing will move from the research setting into the clinical setting — but that […]

MEwens
Hostile Bid For Illumina: Swiss drug maker Roche is making a $44.50 per-share hostile bid for Illumina, valuing the gene-sequencing company at $5.7 billion, the WSJ reports. Illumina has already rejected an offer of $40 per share, Roche says. The latest bid represents a premium of about 18% to Illumina’s $37.69 closing price […]

MEwens
Genome sequencing is poised to get even cheaper — perhaps costing as little as $1,000 by the end of the year, as the WSJ recently reported.
But being able to bang out a patient’s genome relatively inexpensively and quickly — Life Technologies says it expects to soon be able to deliver that information in […]

Louise Radnofsky
$1,000 Genome in Sight?: Life Technologies will announce today a machine that — by the end of the year, the company says — will be able to map an individual’s complete genome for $1,000, and within a day, the WSJ reports. Right now the genome can be mapped for about $3,000 over […]

MEwens
If you were tested for the “breast cancer gene” — mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that raise the risk of breast, ovarian and other cancers — would you tell your children?
That’s the question researchers posed to 253 parents, almost all of them women, who underwent BRCA gene testing and had at […]

MEwens
Cocaine can change the brain in ways that can be passed on to male offspring, making them less likely to find the drug rewarding or work hard to get it, according to new research on the epigenetics of drug abuse.
The study, made public this week at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience […]

MEwens
No Benefit: A large study published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association finds annual chest X-rays don’t reduce lung-cancer deaths, the WSJ reports. By contrast, a separate study published last year found that screening current and former heavy smokers with low-dose CT scans did cut the death rate from the […]

MEwens
Two More Deaths Recorded: The CDC says listeria-tainted cantaloupes from a Colorado farm have now sickened at least 116 people, killing 23 of them, CNN reports. The cantaloupes were recalled by Jensen Farms last month, but the infection can take up to two months to produce symptoms, which means the number of cases […]

MEwens
Serial Killers: Genetically engineering certain immune-system cells to identify and then destroy a certain protein found on leukemia cells can put patients into sustained remission from their cancer, the WSJ reports. Research on three people published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine shows that the treatment has harsh […]

Katherine Hobson
Sibling centenarians Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert, 109, with her brother Irving Kahn, 105.
New York centenarians are the starting point for a nationwide effort to figure out the genetic and lifestyle elements contributing to long, healthy lives.
As our colleagues at the WSJ’s Metropolis blog report, geneticist Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of […]