Bio-IT World Announces 2019 Best Of Show Award Winners
April 17, 2019 | BOSTON—Today Bio-IT World announced the 2019 winners of the Best of Show Awards Program to a packed audience at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. The awards program recognizes the best of the innovative product solutions for the life sciences industry on display at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.
"The innovation on display by Bio-IT World exhibitors never disappoints," said Bio-IT World Editor Allison Proffitt. "It's always a treat to see the work and dedication from companies firsthand, and we are excited to shine a spotlight on the best life sciences has to offer."
The Best of Show program relies on a panel of expert judges from academia and industry who screen eligible new products and hear presentations from finalists on site. This year our judges considered 31 new products and viewed presentations on site from 12 finalists.
The judges chose five winners this year. The Bio-IT community also voted on the People's Choice Award, selecting products that they believe measurably improve workflow or capacity, enabling better research.
The 2019 judging panel included Richard Holland, New Forest Ventures; Eleanor Howe, Diamond Age Data Science; Phillips Kuhl, Cambridge Healthtech Institute; Steve Marshall, Marshall Data Solutions; Nanguneri Nirmala, Tufts University School of Medicine; Alexander Sherman, Massachusetts General Hospital; Subi Subramanian, Vertex Pharmaceuticals; Bill Van Etten, BioTeam; Anthony Dibiase, a consultant, Shikha O’Brien, Illumina and Proffitt.
2019 Bio-IT World Best of Show Winners
People's Choice
ONTOFORCE
Product Name: 2019 Linked Data Ingestion Engine
The new Data Ingestion Engine added to the existing faceted browsing and visual analytics engine in the DISQOVER platform contains the following:
- A performant and scalable Extract, Transform, Link, Infer & Load (ETLIL) engine, capable of creating massive amounts of links & performing inferencing.
- Using semantic concepts (RDF triples and ontologies) as a data reasoning model.
- Capable of performing ETLIL actions on massively linked data using commodity hardware (e.g. ~10 billion triples on single machine with 6 cores / 64Gb RAM).
- Managed by a graphical, component-based pipeline via a user-friendly frontend.
-Incremental updating of the pipeline when a data source gets updated
- Including full data transformation inspection capacities (both upstream & downstream).
- All combined with tolerance-based, process-oriented Quality Control (QC), usable for real-world data.
> Tolerance-based: no rigid schema is required
> Process oriented:
- incoming QC (verifying source data)
- within-process QC (verifying intermediate results) and
- outgoing QC (verifying end result data) can be specified.
"Where the Puck is Going" Award
Genomenon
Product Name: Mastermind Reporter
Genomenon uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate the literature curation process. The result is Mastermind, the most comprehensive database of genomic information in the world.
Mastermind automatically reads the titles and abstracts of every scientific medical paper published, over 30 million! The full text of papers with genomic information is then indexed to develop the most comprehensive view of the genomic landscape. To date, Mastermind has indexed the text of over 6.2 million genetic publications and covers over 4.1 million variants.
The genomic data found in the publications is processed through Genomenon’s patented Genomic Language Processing (GLP). More sophisticated than Natural Language Processing, GLP identifies every way that an author can describe a gene or variant and filters out erroneous information that can be mistaken for genomic data.
The data is then presented in a multi-faceted web interface, utilizing sophisticated algorithms designed to show the most relevant results first. Advanced filtering options allow the user to search broadly for maximal sensitivity or narrowly for optimal specificity.
The latest version of Mastermind includes Mastermind Reporter, a visualization tool that enables researchers to view, search, and filter large collections of curated data such as complete functional variant landscapes for solid tumor and heme oncology.
The Mastermind Genomic Search Engine, together with Mastermind Reporter, gives pharma and bio-pharma researchers the most comprehensive genomic landscape for any disease assembled from the published research for applications in drug discovery and clinical trial target identification.
"No BS AI" Award
Genedata AG
Product Name: Genedata Imagence 1.0
The new product presents a new deep learning based solution for phenotypic imaging and corresponding workflows based on convolutional neural networks. It yields improvements in automated image analysis for high content screens (HCS) including the ability to:
• rapidly detect and define all cellular phenotypes in an HCS;
• efficiently generate training data and on these train Deep Learning networks for subsequent classification of HCS image sets in production assays; and
• precisely quantify the relevant pharmacology.
The solution reduces time and costs required for phenotypic image analysis by generalization of expert input, producing quality results from a new experiment takes just seconds vs. weeks typically required by manual optimization with existing legacy systems.
The solution seamlessly integrates with Genedata Screener for detailed pharmacological assessment and profiling.
Patient-Focused Software Award
Kanda Software
Product Names: Trapelo & LifePod Virtual Caregiver
Trapelo is the only real-time precision medicine platform that enables everyone involved in cancer care to align their decision making and reimbursement policies with the most current clinical evidence in molecular oncology.
The platform features configurable practice, lab and payor modules that facilitate real-time, evidence-based decision support that lets oncologists know what to tests to order for which patients and from which labs, and then helps them interpret the results for more informed treatment decisions – all of this in the context of the patient’s insurance policies. This optimizes efficiency while giving oncologists confidence they’ve ordered the most relevant tests based on their patient’s disease and clinical stage.
Kanda's second application, LifePod’s Virtual Caregiver service, expands the capabilities of popular smart speakers (e.g., Amazon’s Echo) with patent-pending innovations that make LifePod an easy-to-use, 2-way voice service for seniors or chronically-ill patients living at home and their caregivers. Unlike traditional voice assistants, LifePod can be set up and controlled by a remote caregiver using LifePod’s online Portal and Dialog Management System. In addition, LifePod’s unique “initiation” capability – enabling LifePod to speak to a senior without first being “woken” by the user – means the senior doesn’t have to remember a “wake word” or how to phrase commands in order to feel more connected and supported. Instead, LifePod provides proactive, voice-first check-ins and reminders each day, and encourages senior users to access voice services (e.g., music, weather, etc.) to enhance their day, based on routines configured online by their caregivers.
"Nailed It" Award
PetaGene
Product Name: PetaSuite Protect v1.0
PetaSuite Protect enables organizations to manage access to their genomic data by internal and external teams, secured with fine grain regional encryption and deep auditing of data usage. Moreover, this is done in a manner transparent to existing tools and pipelines and integrates with existing on-premises and cloud storage infrastructure.
The state-of-the-art prior to PetaSuite Protect is to grant access to users of genomic data on a whole-file or whole-object basis, which means the person it belongs to might be identifiable. While some file-systems support auditing of accesses by internal users, there is very little visibility into what users are doing with this data. And when granting access to external users, there is typically no visibility at all once the data have been transferred to them.
With PetaSuite Protect, users see regular genomic files. When they access these files, they only see the specific regions that they have permissions to view. PetaSuite Protect gives live information on the use of genomic data by those parties, and the ability to immediately grant or revoke access privileges.
Organizations can allocate GA4GH-defined data management roles. Every user access is logged in a tamper-resistant and easily searchable cryptographic ledger. Not only is user and file information recorded but also details of what application was used for access, and what genomic regions were read. Furthermore, decryption and decompression are performed on the client with a transparent high-performance library, rather than by the server. This ensures high scalability across multiple users.