Paradigm Lays off 50, but Informatics Staff Spared
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Paradigm Genetics’ acting CEO John Hamer said last week that despite internal restructuring that resulted in the layoff of 50 employees — 20 percent of its workforce — the company’s informatics staff remains intact.
The layoffs, which primarily affected agricultural research and administrative positions, came as part of a broader restructuring effort within the company, which included the creation of distinct business units for agriculture and human health, a relatively new focus area for the Research Triangle Park, NC-based company.
The informatics team has been split between the business groups to reflect the new project-oriented structure, Hamer said.
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Millennium Taps Ingenuity Systems to Create Knowledge Management System
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Ingenuity Systems, an Alviso, Calif.-based developer of life science knowledge management solutions, has secured its first customer win with Millennium Pharmaceuticals.
Ingenuity will create a customized knowledge base linking Millennium’s internal research with data from the scientific literature. In turn, Millennium will provide R&D funding to Ingenuity and will make an equity investment in the company.
Ingenuity, founded in October 1998, has developed a proprietary biological ontology and a knowledgebase of over 500,000 findings extracted from the scientific literature and restructured based on the ontology.
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U of Chicago Named Sun COE in Bioinformatics
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Sun Microsystems has selected the University of Chicago as its latest Center of Excellence in bioinformatics, computational biology and medical informatics.
Sun will install a large computational cluster based on Solaris and Sun’s Grid Engine software. Hardware will include a Sun Fire 6800 enterprise server with 4.6 terabytes of storage housed in Sun StorEdge T3 arrays; a Sun Fire V880 and a Sun Fire 280Rs; a technical compute farm with 52 processors and other servers for high-performance bioinformatics computing; and several dozen Sun Blade 1000 desktops and Sun Ray appliances.