The company, which has licensed intellectual property related to use of the auto-antibodies from UCSD, aims to develop the diagnostics first as CLIA-based tests and ultimately in a microarray format available to physicians.

Based on a bioinformatic screen of roughly 6,000 human proteins, the scientists proposed that the anti-cancer effects of the HIV drug -- currently in clinical trials as a cancer treatment -- stem from weak binding to multiple protein kinases upstream of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway.

Researchers are trying to get the immune system to martial its defenses against melanoma.

In Clinical Cancer Research this week: targeting anaplastic lymphoma kinase in lung cancer, association between tumor-infiltrating macrophages and metastasis suppression, and more.

The findings suggest that guidelines for chronic kidney disease testing, which have come under increased scrutiny in recent years, could benefit from including albumin and cystatin C levels in definitions of the disease.

Researchers at Virginia Tech; the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and the J. Craig Venter Institute will have free access to the Azure cloud platform as part of a two-year agreement between the NSF and Microsoft.

BlueSeq’s web-based platform offers a project-design tool that asks a series of questions to help users plan and design their sequencing projects and then matches them to sequencing providers based on the specific needs of each individual project.

The redesigned Entrez Genome Project will be renamed the BioProject database and will include "data that’s more than just genomes," an NCBI official said.

Microsoft Research launched a beta release of the next version of the Microsoft Biology Foundation toolkit and a coding contest to develop applications for the software.

The scientists will use GPU-accelerated alignment and mapping software in combination with sensitive mutation detection methods to deliver "an optimized and powerful solution" for cancer genome analysis.

The company said that the FDA's biomarker qualification group will use the resource, named GOBIOM, short for GVK BIO Online Biomarker Database.

NSF Bioinformatics Grants Awarded April 1 — April 27, 2011

BioKnowledge Transfer tool, NextGene 2.14, Sage-N Research Developer's Toolkit, EcoCyc-Mobile

Justinas Vygintas Daugmaudis, Michele dos Santos da Silva, Mikael Eric Trellet, Chuan Hock Koh, Michał Koziarski, Sheena Scroggins

With the deal, Myriad will acquire RBM's biomarker discovery platform as well as its pipeline of proprietary protein biomarker-based diagnostics, including two tests that a Myriad official said were "relatively close to commercial launch."

Manchester Management's James Besser this week sent a letter to the company's board and shareholders asserting that management had moved the date of Vermillion's annual meeting to make difficult any action by shareholders dissatisfied by the poor performance of the firm's stock.

According to President and CEO Douglas Berthiaume, LC and mass spec instrument sales both grew at rates of over 20 percent as the company saw "continued rapid uptake" of its Acuity H-Class UPLC and Xevo mass spectrometry systems.

The company's Bruker Scientific Instruments Segment, which contains its mass spectrometry products, saw revenues climb to $335.8 million, a 29 percent rise from $260.3 million a year ago.

Revenues for the company's Analytical Technologies segment, which includes its life sciences mass spectrometry business, climbed 9 percent to $1.18 billion from $1.08 billion a year ago.

NIH Grants in Proteomics, March 24 to April 28

The Belgian firm is developing tests to determine whether individuals have increased risk for certain diseases, to detect congenital genetic defects, and to identify the most appropriate treatments.

A group of partners from the three countries will share genomic evaluation data for breeding and boosting the total number of cattle being examined.

The company is "working diligently" to bring its second-generation quantitative products to the US market.

Life Technologies and Cepheid named new board members this week, while Illumina's Peter Fromen got promoted, Verinata named a new CEO, and more.

In Brief This Week is a Friday column containing news items that our readers may have missed during the week.