Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Kicks Off in Boston
April 5, 2016 | BOSTON—The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo kicks off today in downtown Boston, and a host of companies have made news and announcements already. Here’s a roundup of news and notes we’ve seen so far.
--The Editors
Human Longevity yesterday announced an offering of Series B Preferred Stock, raising in excess of $220 million from Illumina, Celgene, GE Ventures, and Series A investors. HLI plans to use the money to fund the growth and expansion of the company and its products including Health Nucleus, HLI's comprehensive, genomic-enhanced, research-based health center; ongoing development of the HLI Knowledgebase which currently has more than 20,000 complete genomes coupled with phenotype data; the Comprehensive Cancer Program and other sequencing programs. Yaron Turpaz, HLI’s Chief Information Officer, is part of the closing plenary panel at Bio-IT World on Thursday. (Thursday, April 7, Seaport World Trade Center amphitheater, 8:00 am)
Voting opens this evening at 5:00 for the 2016 Bio-IT World People’s Choice Award. Part of the Best of Show product competition, the People’s Choice Award is voted on by the entire bioIT community. The voting link will be live at 5:00 pm. Watch #BestofShow16 and the @BioITWorld twitter account. Update: The voting link is live!
Sunquest Information Systems announced the acquisition of GeneInsight yesterday. GeneInsight is a platform for analyzing and interpreting genetic tests and reporting those results clinically. The platform was born in the lab of Heidi Rehm, Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, Partners Healthcare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine. Rehm is giving the opening keynote at Bio-IT World tonight. (Seaport World Trade Center amphitheater, 4:00 pm)
Edico has licensed the Broad Institute’s GATK software for deployment on DRAGEN. Called Accelerated GATK, this further expands the suite of genomic analysis algorithms their customers are able to use. By combining the speed of DRAGEN with GATK, the processor is able to complete variant calling analysis in 15 minutes, compared to approx. 30 hours otherwise required. In addition, DRAGEN is also now being used with the IBM Power Systems platform, which was used when Stephen Kingsmore achieved the 26-hour diagnosis. All of Edico’s pipeline algorithms, including Accelerated GATK, can be run on IBM Power Systems, and updated versions are made available for customers through simple remote downloads. (Edico and IBM will be together at booth #460)
Armanino (booth #550) released Life Sciences Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX, today, an all-inclusive ERP solution built on the Dynamics AX platform. A Gold Certified Microsoft Dynamics ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM Partner, Armanino created the new Life Sciences module to deliver 95% of the functionality that most life science companies require including regulatory compliance; CAPA, NCR & complaint management; quality management and equipment calibration; audit management; 21 CFR Part 11 Electronic Signatures; and product research and development.
Dassault Systèmes’ (booth #416) and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research plan to deploy a "virtual collaborative platform" to both advance research in the areas of cancer, aging, genomics and microbiota as well as to advance the use of "virtual clinical trials." At the core of these initiatives is an integrated virtual environment for open collaborative research, unified laboratory management and biological and chemical modeling and simulation from Dassault Systèmes’ flagship brand BIOVIA.
Illumina (booth #161) is now offering professional consulting services from technical experts to help laboratories minimize trial-and-error when adopting new protocols, scaling up, or implementing NGS for the first time. Services include proof-of-concept testing, genomics IT consulting, instrument qualification and compliance, hands-on-training, and bioinformatics services.
Dotmatics (booth #342) announced a partnership today with BioByte, producer of the industry gold standard partition coefficient calculator (ClogP). This deal will enable users of the Dotmatics Platform including Vortex and Browser to calculate ClogP seamlessly within the applications. This will streamline the research process and speed up the selection of potential drug candidates.
InterpretOmics (booth #521) announced iOMICS Research 4.0 today, a unified sequence analytics software for management, analysis, and interpretation of Microarray and NGS data. The iOMICS Research applications support early-stage research in disease research & management and agri-genomics with unprecedented ease and accuracy.
Ontoforce (booth #551) announced DISQOVER, ONTOFORCE’s semantic search platform, enabling users to add and find life changing data faster, smarter and simpler. Searching an unlimited number of linked internal, external and third party data resources becomes simple through one, fast, customizable and user-friendly interface in a scalable cloud architecture.
5AM Solutions will demonstrate its new product, 5AM Sunrise, with Cloudera (booth #149), who is providing the infrastructure for the demo. 5AM Sunrise automates the data cleaning process for disparate clinical, genomic, population and environmental datasets, making it as much as 50% faster.