GenomeWeb Daily News reports that DNA sequencing is able to track cancerous blood cells in leukemia patients even when currently used methods cannot. The findings, published on May 16 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggest that high-throughput sequencing could improve the diagnosis and post-treatment monitoring of leukemia. The sequencing-based method is more sensitive than one of the two typical methods of detecting the malignant cells (flow cytometry) and cheaper and faster than the other (quantitative real-time PCR).

GenomeWeb notes that the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, one of the research institutions involved in the study, has applied for patents related to the technique.

Facebook yesterday amended its IPO documents to underscore to investors the business risks of its rapidly rising use on mobile devices, where it brings in no meaningful advertising dollars.

But the company may face even more fundamental questions about advertising from its existing customers.

I talked with William Pearce, a business school lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. He’s worked for some major brands: he was Chief Marketing Officer of Del Monte until 2011, and previously held the same role at Taco Bell as well top positions at Campbells Soup and Proctor & Gamble.

Marketers, Pearce said, are still in the early stages of evaluating the value of the Facebook fan page. That's one main way major consumer companies engage with segments of the social network’s users. Often they'll buy paid advertising or sponsored stories on Facebook to promote that page.

So what’s the value of a Facebook brand page with a million fans? How does that translate to sales? 

Facebook’s main customers—that is, the marketers buying ads—don’t yet know. There's not yet a lot of data, and some, Pearce said, are frustrated that the company isn’t doing enough to help them figure it out. 

“Facebook likes to say to advertisers: you’re thinking about us all wrong. Don’t think of us as a traditional advertising platform. Think of us a way to open a dialogue with your customers," he said. "That may be true. But if that is in fact the case, they’re going to have to price their product in a way that makes sense to marketers." 

There’s also still a lot of room for Facebook to grow. Advertising made up 85 percent of Facebook's total revenue last year, or $3.2 billion dollars, but the biggest global brands spend up as much as a $1 billion each on their marketing budgets. 

The company could be valued at up to $96 billion dollars when it hits the market on May 18th. It is expected to be the largest-ever IPO from an Internet company.

At the second day of a manufacturing conference on MIT’s campus, the CEO of pharmaceutical giant Novartis, Joseph Jimenez, suggested big changes are in store for the way his company makes drugs. A new, experimental method for producing pills could drastically reduce production times, increase revenue, and improve quality, he said.

Typically, drugs are produced batch by batch—workers at a chemical manufacturing plant take a certain amount of raw materials, transform them into active pharmaceutical ingredients, and then often ship the ingredients to another site where another set of workers converts the material into a batch of pills. However, Novartis, and perhaps other drug companies, may make drugs quite differently in the future. The company has been working with MIT for five years to develop a system in which drugs are continuously made, ingredients added as needed, all in one location. The continuous method setup also allows manufacturers to use different chemical reactions than can be used in the batch method.

Jimenez’s presentation suggested the collaboration has been quite a success. Using the typical batch method, it took the company nearly 12 months to turn raw ingredients into packaged pills of Diovan, a Novartis drug used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure. Using the continuous manufacturing method, the same could be achieved in a mere six hours, said Jimenez.

“This will change the way medicine is made around the world,” he said.

The company plans to build a commercial-scale continuous manufacturing facility by 2015.