April 11: News and Notes from the Expo Floor

April 12, 2013 | The 2013 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo closed yesterday--an energetic three days as members from the life sciences and biotech industries convened in Boston. With over 125 exhibitors and 12 tracks, the event is fully-packed. Here are some highlights from a very busy Expo floor:

The conference kicked off with great keynotes from Andrew Hopkins on Tuesday afternoon and Atul Butte on Wednesday morning.

Wednesday morning the 2013 Best Practices Award winners were announced. Grand prize winners were named in four life sciences categories highlighting best practices in genomics, cloud computing, big data in disease research, and big pharma data management from the Genomic Medicine Institute at Geisinger, Schrödinger, Prize4Life, and GlaxoSmithKline. In addition, the Judges’ Prize was awarded to Genentech and the Editors’ Choice Award was given to Partners Healthcare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine for the GeneInsight Suite. Projects from JBI, Amgen, and Immune Tolerance Network received honorable mention.

Later that day on the Expo floor, the Best of Show winners were announced. New products were recognized from Biofortis, Seven Bridges Genomics, Bright Computing, and ePharmaSolutions.

Internet Evolution summarized Martin Leach’s thoughts on collaboration and how to foster in a way that “transcends space and time.”

During an excellent closing session on the New York Genome Center, Scientific Director Bob Darnell announced that Toby Bloom is leaving Broad Institute to become Deputy Director of Bioinformatics and that Albert Einstein was becoming the 12th institution to join NYGC. 

Alexander Zaranek (co-founder Clinical Future) announced the 'soft launch' of a large scale distributed computing system tuned to the unique requirements of genomic data and biomedical computing. Called Arvados, Zaranek is using the system at the Personal Genome Project to power two clusters with more than 300 TB of storage and 500 cores.

IBM and CLC bio announced a combined turnkey next generation sequencing data analytics solution: a scalable end-to-end solution that integrates a computing cluster built on advanced IBM hardware, CLC Genomics Server software for large-scale genomics sequencing data analysis, and CLC Genomics Workbench client software for analyzing, comparing, and visualizing high-throughput sequencing data.

Pfizer and GGA Software Services presented Indigo ELN, an open source version of the big pharma’s internal chemistry electronics lab notebook. The system is publicly available for downloading at GGA’s website under the open-source GNU General Public License.