Best of Show Winners Named at 2014 Bio-IT World Conference
By Bio-IT World Staff
May 2, 2014 | This year’s Bio-IT World Conference and Expo, held from April 29 to May 1 at the World Trade Center in Boston, was the largest in the event’s thirteen-year history, attracting over 3,000 attendees and around 150 exhibitors on the Expo floor. The conference has become a hub for technology innovators in the life sciences, and numerous companies launched new products or provided an early opportunity to see recent releases in action. (For news announcements from the first day of the conference, see “Notes from the Expo Floor.”)
The Best of Show contest once again gave Bio-IT World the chance to explore and recognize the latest developments in bioinformatics and life sciences IT. More than 30 companies presenting new products at Bio-IT World entered this year’s Best of Show contest, competing in the categories of Informatics Tools and Data, Web-Based Services and Software, and IT Hardware and Infrastructure. From this pool of contestants, a panel of expert judges selected three finalists and one winner from each category, after onsite meetings with the finalists. The winners were announced on Wednesday, April 30, at a reception on the Expo floor.
In the Informatics Tools and Data category, Ayasdi received the grand prize for Ayasdi Cure, a data analysis and visualization platform launched at the conference on Tuesday. Ayasdi’s products bring topological analysis to complex, multivariate data sets, revealing meaningful patterns by showing which variables are most closely associated and sorting data points into like clusters. The new Ayasdi Cure product is built specifically for use in drug development, helping biotech and pharmaceutical companies to identify lead compounds optimized for particular targets over a range of values. Notably, Ayasdi was also a winner in this year’s Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards, for a project at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai that revealed three previously unknown, distinct subtypes of Type 2 Diabetes through topological analysis. The other finalists in this category were Cambridge Semantics, for the Anzo Pharma Information Workbench, and Sinequa, for the semantic data analysis platform Sinequa ES V9.
In the Web-Based Services and Software category, the grand prize was awarded to GenoSpace, whose cloud platform GenoSpace for Clinical Care uses diverse sources of molecular data to deliver clinically relevant reports to physicians. This precision medicine software-as-a-service offers therapeutic suggestions based on a patient’s unique profile, and can also be used for the discovery of novel biomarkers or to assemble cohorts for clinical trials. The other finalists in this category were Aspera, for Aspera Drive, and Studylog Systems, for the Studylog Animal Study Workflow Software.
In the IT Hardware and Infrastructure category, Cycle Computing took home the top prize for CycleServer SubmitOnce, a software system to maximize the value of an organization’s compute resources. SubmitOnce routes jobs to the optimal servers, whether onsite or in the cloud, ensuring that computing power is not wasted or left idle. The other finalists in this category were Avere Systems, for Avere Cloud NAS, and Edico Genome, for the DRAGEN Bio-IT Processor, a piece of hardware optimized for next-generation sequencing analytics that Bio-IT World recently reported on.