Software Applications and Services Image

As data generation increases, there is a need for workflows that are reproducible across infrastructures, and empower scientists and researchers to apply cutting-edge analysis methods. One problem is scientific data are not centralized or standardized and are fragmented–from instrumentation to clinical research to legacy software. A second problem is critical validation of algorithms is commonly overlooked. There are real-world differences in data equivalence for integration and analysis, without adequate contextual information. The Software Applications and Services track explores how biopharma companies are driving data strategies and scientific decision-making by leveraging software tools and data platforms. Case studies will be presented on software tools to facilitate data manipulation, data analytics approaches, data methods and standards approaches, transparency, efficiency, security, and cost-effective solutions.

Monday, September 20

7:30 am Registration Open
8:00 am Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops*

Cambridge Healthtech Institute is pleased to offer morning and afternoon pre-conference workshops on Monday, September 20, 2021. They are designed to be instructional, interactive and provide in-depth information on a specific topic. They allow for one-on-one interaction and provide a great way to explain more technical aspects that would otherwise not be covered during the main conference tracks that take place Tuesday-Wednesday. 

*Separate registration required. See Workshop page for details.

9:30 am Break
9:45 am Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops*
11:15 am Enjoy Lunch on Your Own
12:45 pm Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops*
2:15 pm Break
2:30 pm Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops*
4:00 pm Session Break and Transition to Plenary Keynote

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

4:15 pm Innovative Practices Awards – Winners Spotlight
4:20 pm PANEL DISCUSSION:

Pharma Executive Roundtable: Broadening the Data Ecosystem

Panel Moderator:
Lita Sands, Head, Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

The Bio-IT World community employed creativity, problem solving, and technical ingenuity to weather 2020 and never was the work more important. Meanwhile, digitization has been broadening the horizons of new possibilities and initiatives that are driving innovation in the life sciences sector. While over the past year many pharmaceutical companies have seen an acceleration of digital transformation, there are still many that are unsure what to expect going forward. Digital transformation is now a strategic imperative, not a buzzword. Join our Pharma Executive Roundtable to discover how biopharma companies are broadening their digital strategies and capabilities to develop products and services to scale, streamline operations, and drive innovation in life sciences R&D. 

Panelists:
Ramesh V. Durvasula, PhD, Vice President & Information Officer, Research Labs, Eli Lilly & Co.
Michael Montello, Senior Vice President, R&D Tech, GlaxoSmithKline
Bryn Roberts, PhD, Senior Vice President & Global Head of Data Services, Roche
Holly Soares, PhD, Vice President & Head, Precision Medicine, Pfizer Inc.
5:45 pm Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
7:00 pm Close of Day

Tuesday, September 21

7:00 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee

TOOLS, MODELS, AND SERVICES TO AUTOMATE AND OPTIMIZE DIGITAL DATA FLOW & PROCESSES

8:00 am Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Bio-IT World Conference & Expo

8:10 am

Portable Genomics and How It Can Be Used for Biosurveillance

Laura Boykin, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam

Portable DNA sequencing and computing technologies have great potential for point-of-care solutions with real-time results. In this talk I will outline how we have used the Oxford Nanopore portable genomics technology to sequence whole plant virus genomes on the farms in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. I will also cover the gaps in computing we have identified with our on farm genomic sequencing and discuss potential applications for biosurveillance.

8:40 am

Brew Your SODA, or Get It Delivered! - How Can Scientific Operational Data Fuel Data-Driven Innovation?

Andreas Steinbacher, PhD, Lead Discovery Informatics Data Management, Roche pRED Informatics

Modern life science R&D engines typically consist of several specialized units or laboratories that each deal with a particular step in the drug discovery process. This in turn requires smart planning and tracking features, i.e., capturing operational data, to be able to keep cycle times to a minimum, especially if other organizations or partners fulfill certain steps in such a process. This talk aims at identifying the essential requirements of a ‘Scientific Operational Data (SODA) management system’ for the life science research space and how it can digitally augment the innovation process by enabling just-in-time operations and supporting data-driven decision-making.

9:10 am Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
10:00 am

Selecting the Right Project Methodology for Your Project

Gurpreet Kanwar, Senior Manager, Project Delivery Services, NAV CANADA

Selecting the right methodology for executing the project will lead to successful delivery and provide business value. With this presentation, you will learn how and which methodology will work for your projects based on the selected project parameters. Selection from Waterfall to Agile to Hybrid methodologies and the deliverables associated with them will help you understand the project needs and deliver benefits while identifying the right resources, budget and timeline.

John Burke, PhD, Co-Founder, President and CEO, Applied BioMath

Early R&D poses many questions and challenges when determining if a therapeutic enters the portfolio. In this presentation we will demonstrate how our new interactive software tool systematically investigates the therapeutic characteristics (e.g., format, half-life, affinity, mechanism of action) given target characteristics (e.g., target expression and turnover) necessary to achieve success criteria given the predetermined target profile to help accelerate and de-risk your project. 

Chrissy Glazier, Senior Manager, Research Operations, Amgen

Research projects can only move as fast as a scientist’s ability to find, order, and receive their requested material. Therefore, providing a standardized platform for the identification of requested research material across multiple inventory database software platforms (registries) is essential for Amgen’s highest priority drug discovery projects. In our experience, a single registry cannot adequately identify and characterize the wide variety of multi-modality research materials being generated at Amgen. We will present how the integration of OIL with our Mosaic inventory management platform provides a single point of access for scientists around the world to search and request any research material efficiently and effectively, regardless of which registry contains it.

11:00 am Session Break and Transition to Luncheon Presentation
11:15 am Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own
12:00 pm Session Break and Transition to Exhibit Hall
12:15 pm Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

Michael Stapleton, PhD, Managing Director, Life Sciences, Accenture
1:15 pm

How Digital Evolution and an Attitudinal Revolution are Re-Shaping the Future of the Life Sciences Industry

Nimita Limaye, PhD, Research Vice President, Life Sciences R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC

The world has rapidly transitioned to a model of disaggregated care and decentralized clinical trials, with a heightened focus on patient-centricity. Digital resiliency has become the priority and discretionary spend on R&D platforms has been delayed. Federated-learning models are fueling co-innovation and GPU-powered transformer models are accelerating drug discovery. Technology is enabling access and equity. The borders between healthcare and life sciences are blurring and real-world data is being leveraged to drive a precision medicine strategy.

1:50 pm

All of Us Research Program – Seeking To Advance Precision Health for All Populations

Joshua Denny, MD, MS, CEO, All of Us Research Program, National Institutes of Health

The All of Us Research Program launched May 6, 2018 and currently has over 375,000 participants who have contributed biospecimens, health surveys, and a willingness to share their EHR. Participants are partners in the program and receive research results from data they contribute, including genetic ancestry and traits. In the future, participants will also receive health-related genomic results from whole genome sequencing. In May 2020, the program launched the beta version of the Researcher Workbench. Once researchers register and are approved to use the workbench, they can access individual-level data and a suite of tools to analyze these data. All of Us is committed to catalyzing a robust ecosystem of researchers and providing a rich dataset that drives discovery and improves health.

2:30 pm Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

TOOLS, MODELS, AND SERVICES TO AUTOMATE AND OPTIMIZE DIGITAL DATA FLOW & PROCESSES

3:00 pm Chairperson's Remarks
3:05 pm

CO-PRESENTATION: TransCelerate’s Digital Data Flow Initiative: Transforming Clinical Study Protocols through an Interoperable Data Model

Bob Hayden, Architecture Director, Research and Development Informatics, Amgen
Samuel W Hume, VP Data Science, Data Science, CDISC

TransCelerate’s Digital Data Flow Initiative is looking to facilitate a pathway to clinical study startup automation. The proposed conceptual design and subsequent collaboration across the pharma industry, technology providers, and standard setting organizations can lead to a future where clinical study protocols become the foundation for seamless digital data flow across clinical trial systems and software. In this session, hear about the design and plans for the foundational reference implementation to enable end-to-end automation from clinical study design to startup.

3:35 pm

Enabling the "F" and "A" in FAIR Data

Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director, Globus, University of Chicago
Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago

Sharing data with collaborators–and the broader community–is a pervasive requirement in research endeavors. However, the "F" and "A" of FAIR data are particularly challenging at scale. We will describe how capabilities provided by Globus at the University of Chicago make data findable and accessible, using simple frameworks and services that enable rapid development of data portals/commons in a variety of life sciences projects.

4:05 pm Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
4:35 pm

Autolab: A Platform for Digital Transformation of Lab Workflows

Pedro Ivo Guimaraes, PhD, Scientist and Product Manager, Roche

AutoLab is a laboratory workflow orchestration platform that enables the creation of true digital lab workflows to take scientists one step closer to the Lab of Future dream. AutoLab is capable of seamlessly integrating devices and other applications in an-easy-to use digital workflow, guiding the scientist in their daily work and automating several time-consuming tasks. In this presentation, I will present the challenges that lead to the development of such a platform, how AutoLab is helping Roche pRED overcome them, and how we are using AutoLab to catalyze the digital transformation of pharma research at Roche .

Barrie Nelson, Vice President, Digital Clinical Innovation & Chief Standards Officer, Exec Team, Nurocor

Executives responsible for Clinical Operations face increasing pressures to reduce costs, meet ever aggressive timelines and improve productivity of Trial Execution Teams. The Nurocor automation solution saves, conservatively, $8,000,000 and 8 months on a typical Phase 3 trial. The Nurocor solution provides quality by design planning and execution, maximizing the value of existing systems through built in connectivity, and enables high value staff to focus on critical tasks not the mundane. 

Kelly Bachovchin, PhD, Customer Engagement Scientist, Support, Collaborative Drug Discovery

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) provides a whole solution for today’s biological and chemical data needs, differentiated by ease-of-use and superior collaborative capabilities. CDD Vault® software includes Activity & Registration, Visualization, Inventory, and ELN capabilities. Researchers can archive, mine, and securely collaborate within CDD Vault. Collaborative hypothesis generation and evaluation allow multiple perspectives for multi-parameter optimization. 

5:35 pm Networking Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
6:35 pm Close of Day

Wednesday, September 22

7:30 am Registration Open
8:00 am Interactive Discussions

Interactive Discussions are informal, moderated discussions, allowing participants to exchange ideas and experiences and develop future collaborations around a focused topic. Each discussion will be led by a facilitator who keeps the discussion on track and the group engaged. For in-person events, the facilitator will lead from the front of the room while attendees remain seated. For virtual attendees, the format will be in an online networking platform. To get the most out of this format, please come prepared to share examples from your work, be a part of a collective, problem-solving session, and participate in active idea sharing. Please visit the website's Interactive Discussions page for a complete listing of topics and descriptions.

9:00 am Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

MODELS AND METHODS TO ACCELERATE DATA, CLINICAL AND BUSINESS TRANSFORMATIONS

9:45 am Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Bio-IT World Conference & Expo

9:50 am

Patient Centric Real-World Data

Dana Hosseini, Chief Business Officer, Seqster

Data is everywhere, but where is the patient in the equation? Everyone is talking about patient-centricity. But is it just a buzz word? A latest fad or something that can be enable by technology and design to reach through and make engage patients throughout the clinical trial process and beyond. How can a platform technology leverage the patients themselves to breakdown their data silos and in doing so enhance patient engagement, patient onboard, study and drug compliance and study outcome? That is Seqster. 

Terry Barnhart, PhD, Organizational Development, Novartis

The digitization of the pharmaceutical industry hits three or more different types of innovation sectors at once;  The bio/chemistry/clinical innovation that leads to new medicines; The device innovation that leads to dosing, data generation and tracking; and The digital/app/IT innovation that leads to rapid deployment, novel user interfaces, real-time interactions and analyses.  And we haven’t even mentioned marketing. A key problem is that none of these innovation centers speaks the language of the others.  Just as important, working styles, cultures and regulatory environments differ across these sectors.  These barriers lead to bogged projects, rework and gray hair.  So how do we bridge the language barrier, build teams and projects that work well together, and deliver the promise of the digital pharma space?  This talk will describe methods that you can use to address language, alignment and workstyle barriers to accelerate your transformations.

10:25 am

‘Data-Centricity’ and ‘Patient-Centricity’: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Nimita Limaye, PhD, Research Vice President, Life Sciences R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC

Digital transformation has transformed business processes, and connectivity has driven data liquidity. Data has become the new gold, providing insights and powering critical decisions. In a data-hungry world, data monetization has gained increasing importance. While the industry is still trying to optimize data strategies to drive ‘patient-centricity’, many questions remain unanswered.  This presentation will touch upon how the life sciences industry is trying to recognize the  value of data, models and strategies and who is really benefiting from the same.

10:55 am Talk Title to be Announced
Dana Hosseini, Chief Business Officer, Seqster
David Fenstermacher, Vice President, Precision Medicine & Data Science, DNAnexus

DNAnexus and City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center (COH) embarked on a partnership to develop a scalable cloud-based oncology platform, POSEIDON, to democratize data for COH’s research and clinical programs, accelerating the fulfillment of its Precision Oncology strategy. POSEIDON leverages DNAnexus Apollo and Titan Platforms to combine multi-omics data in a unified environment that supports advanced analytics and visualizations within a collaboration portal to discover new evidence-based treatments and clinical pathways.

11:55 am Session Break and Transition to Luncheon Presentation
12:10 pm Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own
12:55 pm Session Break and Transition to Exhibit Hall
1:10 pm Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

2:10 pm PANEL DISCUSSION:

Trends from the Trenches

Panel Moderator:
Kevin Davies, PhD, Executive Editor, The CRISPR Journal; Founding Editor, Bio-IT World

Since 2010, the “Trends from the Trenches” presentation, given by Chris Dagdigian, has been one of the most popular annual traditions on the Bio-IT Program. The intent of the talk is to deliver a candid (and occasionally blunt) assessment of the best, the worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies (IT) for life sciences. The presentation has helped scientists, leadership, and IT professionals understand the basic topics related to computing, storage, data transfer, networks, cloud, data science, and machine learning that are involved in supporting data-intensive science. In 2021, Chris will give the “Trends from the Trenches” presentation in its original “state-of-the-state address” followed by guest speakers giving podium talks on relevant topics. An interactive Q&A moderated discussion with the audience follows. Come prepared with your questions and commentary for this informative and lively session. To stay connected with Trends from the Trenches updates after today and all year, sign up for BioTeam's newsletter here: https://bit.ly/33uO0OY

Panelists:
Chris Dagdigian, Senior Director, BioTeam, Inc.
Fernanda S. Foertter, PhD, Director of Applications, NextSilicon
Karl Gutwin, PhD, Director, Software Engineering Services, BioTeam, Inc.
Adam Kraut, Director Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture, BioTeam, Inc.
3:30 pm Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
4:00 pm

Beyond Process and Technology – The Human Side of Collaboration

Matthew Trunnell, Data Commoner-at-Large; Executive Director, Pandemic Response Commons; Former Vice President and Chief Data Officer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Lara M. Mangravite, PhD, President, Sage Bionetworks
Ian M. Fore, PhD, Senior Biomedical Informatics Program Manager, Cancer Informatics, NIH NCI
Celeste Blackman, Co-Founder, Green Zone Culture Group and the Radical Collaboration for Women Program
Melissa Nisonger, Analyst, NetImpact Strategies
Leslie D. McIntosh, PhD, CEO, Ripeta, Inc.

Learn how to build practical and immediately useful skills to be more effective collaborators in the biomedical sphere. Explore the impact psychological safety has on our ability to innovate and participate in collaborative projects. Using tools from the Radical Collaboration program along with real-time experiences from the National Cancer Institute’s informatics and IT programs participants will: 1) gain insights into how mindset and attitude impact cooperation and sharing; 2) discover how to be more deliberate in creating environments that inspires trust, candor and innovation; 3) practice skills that invite openness and accountability; 4) identify the three key factors for creating the conditions that invite people to feel valued, capable and respected and why this matters; and 5) discover how collaboration sparks innovation. In the afternoon session, participants will have the opportunity to engage with leaders from the Bio-IT World community and explore how these skills apply to the Biomedical sphere. This training seminar is ideal for those who want to expand their capacity to work more effectively and cooperatively with others and have a willingness to think differently about collaboration. 

5:35 pm Close of Conference





Exhibit Hall and Keynote Pass

Data Platforms and Storage Infrastructure