Spotlight On... Cedars-Sinai to test Fitbit activity trackers in cancer clinical trial; Illumina backs $61M synthetic DNA round; Medidata lands biosimilar clinical trial deal; and more...

Cedars-Sinai is planning to trial the use of Fitbit Charge HR activity trackers to gauge the suitability of cancer patients for certain treatments, MobiHealthNews reports. The trial is an attempt to collect objective data to inform whether to give chemotherapy to patients, the more active of whom tend to respond better, in terms of both safety and efficacy, to the treatment. "We thought that with these expensive activity trackers and wearable biosensors, there may be a way to see how active a patient actually is, and see how they've been doing over the past week, perhaps as a better assessment tool for how functional they are and therefore whether they will or will not tolerate chemotherapy well," principal investigator Dr. Arvind Shinde said. Article

> Twist pulled in $61 million to build out its synthetic DNA business. Article

> Celltrion picked Medidata to support its biosimilar clinical trial program. News

> Definiens introduced an updated version of its tissue analysis software. Item

> Seven Bridges deployed its data analysis system on the Google Cloud Platform. Post

> BioXcel added immuno-oncology capabilities to its predictive analytics platform. Release

> Researchers at a handful of leading universities set up a platform that connects more than 20 bioinformatics software packages. News