What We Are Looking Forward To At #BioIT15

April 6, 2015 | As part of the precision medicine initiative, President Obama proposed a $215 million investment intended to improve how we treat disease and foster health. What’s needed now is the infrastructure to turn data into discovery. 

This year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo (April 21-23, #BioIT15) will be three days of conversations in 12 tracks around those very challenges. Thousands of industry and academic colleagues will discuss themes of big data, security, cloud computing, trends in IT infrastructure, clinical genomics, data visualization and bioinformatics. 

Here are just a few of the sessions we’ve added to our agenda so far.  

- The Editors, Bio-IT World
 

Plenary speakers: Philip Bourne, Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, will share his vision for data at NIH. Christian Sander, chair of the computational biology program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, will share how one of the nation’s leading cancer centers uses computational biology. The final plenary panel will feature groups who are already leading the way in patient mobilization. Benjamin Heywood, PatientsLikeMe; Andreas Kogelnik, Open Medicine Institute; and Katherine Wendelsdorf, Empowered Genome Community will discuss the junction between big data and patient empowerment. Thursday, April 23, 3:00 pm 

Chris Dagdigian, BioTeam, gives his always-candid assessment of the best, the worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies for life sciences. He’s never afraid to name names. Wednesday, April 22, 11:00 am 

Chris Dwan, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, will reveal how the Broad plans data engineering at scale. Look for Dwan to discuss hybrid cloud technologies, moving to object models for data storage, and embracing federated solutions for identity and authorization, all while managing the social aspects of these changes. Thursday, April 23, 11:10 am 

A panel will take on innovation in an era of stringent regulation, with speakers from technology providers weighing in on how regulatory bodies can innovate as well. Moderator: John M. Conley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Panelists: Dana Caulder, Genentech; Chris Dwan, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Sanjay Joshi, EMC; Taha A. Kass-Hout, FDA; Dave Peterson, Kaiser Permanente Information Technology; Vas Vasiliadis, Argonne National Laboratory

Brian Bissett, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, promises to be blunt about big data. Big Data is hailed as the solution to many problems in industry. In many respects this is a fallacy because it only takes a small amount of erroneous data to corrupt the usefulness of a large dataset, he warns. Wednesday, April 22, 1:55 pm 

Dana Caulder, Genentech, will introduce DIVOS, a platform for effective in vivo data management that enables data reuse and data exploration of historical studies by both bench scientists and statisticians. Wednesday, April 22, 4:30 pm 

One of Taha A. Kass-Hout’s first accomplishments after joining FDA as the the first Chief Health Information Officer in March 2013, was to create OpenFDA. The platform allows software developers, researchers and the public to tap into adverse events for drugs and medical devices; recalls, for drugs, devices and foods; and labeling for products on the market. Thursday, April 23, 2:00 pm 

Two talks from Biogen Idec will look at how to use cloud resources securely. Krista Woodley will provide insight on how Biogen Idec best manages SaaS-based projects in a regulated world, by discussing best practices for lifecycle management, change control, security management and IT risk management. Wednesday, April 22, 11:00 am Jason Tetrault will explore how Biogen has built burst capabilities for large-scale NGS. Thursday, April 23, 10:40 am 

Philip G. Abrahamson, IBM, will share his experiences applying IBM Watson Cognitive Computing to help researchers explore huge volumes of unstructured and structured content to discover insights and information. Wednesday, April 22, Noon 

Gil Weigand, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will present a method for evaluation in healthcare testing by introducing in silico methods of big data and modeling & simulation and tightly integrating the methods within a knowledge discovery infrastructure. Wednesday, April 22, 4:30 pm 

In order to facilitate identification and characterization of new classes of genomic features, Michael Buck, NY State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, will explain how his team developed and implemented a chromatin Architecture Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (ArchBLAST). The ArchBLAST algorithm utilizes conserved chromatin architecture or DNA-binding protein signatures at known sites of interest and globally searches the genome for similar sites. Wednesday, April 22, 4:40 pm  

Chunhua Weng, Columbia University, summarizes the patterns in patient selection among > 170,000 clinical trials archived on Clinical Trials.gov and their association with recruitment outcomes. Wednesday, April 22, 11:00 am 

Doug Macfadden and Bhanu Bahl, Harvard Catalyst, will report how the Accrual to Clinical trials (ACT) project was launched, which aims to build a network of Clinical Translational Science Center Award (CTSA) sites that will enable investigators to query EHR data across all these sites for cohort exploration and subsequently engage and enroll identified patients into clinical trials. SHRINE (Shared Health Research Information Network) is a system developed by Harvard Catalyst for enabling clinical researchers to query across distributed hospital electronic medical record systems. Wednesday, April 22, 1:55 pm 

Inna Dubchak, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, takes on genomic data visualization. She will talk about strengths and limitations of existing methods, and highlight new challenges in the visualization of huge volumes of complex comparative data. Thursday, April 23, 2:30 pm 

A panel led by Martin Leach, Biogen Idec, will discuss various approaches to building a data science team, including the assembly, creation and implementation of data science groups for pharma, and how those groups should be structured. For instance, should data scientists be centralized or embedded within other product/functional teams? Panelists include Rainer Fuchs, Harvard Medical; Jason Johnson, Merck; Jake Klamka, Insight Data Science Fellows Program; Daniel H. Robertson, Eli Lilly and Company; Tom Plasterer, AstraZeneca; and Sarah Aerni, Pivotal. Wednesday, April 22, 2:25 pm 

Samuel (Sandy) Aronson, Partners HealthCare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine, will discuss the challenges and opportunities in establishing IT support for continuous learning in healthcare. He’ll present lessons learned from supporting clinical genomic IT processes that may be generalizable to broader development of IT support for continuous learning healthcare processes. Wednesday, April 22, 11:00 am 

Incidental findings are still a topic of sometimes heated debate in genomics. Robert C. Green, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, addresses a fundamental question—penetrance—and presents new data estimating the penetrance of actionable incidental findings. How might incidental findings influence the question of genomic population screening, i.e., whether actionable sequence variants should be sought and reported in ostensibly healthy individuals. Wednesday, April 22, 11:30 am 

Toby Bloom, New York Genome Center and Betsy Fallen, SAFE-BioPharma Association will look at the ethics of genomic research: utility vs. patient rights. They will discuss informed consent, security access, technical infrastructures, genomic and clinical data integration and more. Wednesday, April 22, 5:00 pm 

Natalie Catlett and Anthony Bargnesi, Selventa, present OpenBEL, an open source platform for managing biological knowledge, comprised of the Biological Expression Language (BEL) and a knowledgebase platform. The pair will describe a next-generation Semantic Web RDF platform for harmonization, storage, and access of BEL knowledge; language expansion; and development of an exchange format for biological models derived from BEL knowledge networks. Wednesday, April 22, 11:30 am 

Pistoia Alliance recently launched its Interactive Project Portfolio Platform (IP3), Carmen Nitsche, will discuss ways members and non-members alike can review and contribute to the pool of ideas and assist in their evaluation. The membership then prioritizes and funds the top projects that address immediate and universal pain points within the precompetitive arena of Life Sciences R&D. Thursday, April 23, 3:00 pm