Three IT Tracks At Tri-Con Dig Deep Into Cloud, Data Commons, FAIR Data
November 27, 2017 | The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference will celebrate its 25th anniversary next February in San Francisco*. Originally three back-to back conferences covering the Human Genome Project; genetic screening and diagnosis; and genomic partnering, Tri-Con quickly outgrew the three-conference blueprint. But the name stuck.
This year, Bio-IT World is keeping a close eye on three of the tracks covering integrated pharma informatics, bioinformatics for big data, and converged IT and the cloud, clustered on February 12-14. The three make up a full and rich agenda. Here are a few of the talks we’ve marked so far.
--The Editors
Peyton McNully, CIO, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, says we broke the first cloud—it’s time for Cloud 2.0. Cloud 1.0 brought tremendous convenience and scale, but broke at the edges, McNully contends. He will discuss the origins of cloud, the constraints of clouds, and the benefits of Cloud 2.0 for high throughput population scale problems in genomics and research.
Aaron Gardner, BioTeam, explores how the life sciences' evolving workload, capacity, collaboration, and cost requirements for storage have made architecting next-generation solutions an imperative. Gardner will focus on outlining the needs that new solutions must satisfy as well as discussing how current and future storage technologies may be leveraged to address them.
Several talks and sessions with deal with data commons. Robert Grossman, University of Chicago, leads the Genomic Data Commons (GDC), intended to unlock the potential of the NCI’s vast archive of genomic and clinical data. Because these datasets have grown too large for most laboratories to download or analyze, the GDC provides a centralized and standardized repository and advanced tools so that researchers can work remotely. Since the launch of the GDC, Grossman has also led the development of a new commons for cancer data called the Blood Profiling Atlas for Cancer (BloodPAC), which will be a home for liquid biopsy data with the goal of accelerating the discovery of new biomarkers. There will also be a data commons panel featuring Grossman and Matthew Trunnell, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center; Lucila Ohno-Machado, University of California, San Diego Health; Lara Mangravite, Sage Bionetworks; and Simon Twigger, BioTeam. The panel will tackle challenges in data commons, how data commons connect to open science, and what technology innovations power them.
Martin Leach, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, will describe Alexion’s pragmatic approach to analyze data needs from sourcing, ingestion, cleansing, master data management, and exposing the data for aggregation, reporting, and analytics. Alexion has developed an Enterprise Data Management & Analytics strategy with this in mind and selected and built a next-generation data platform. Leach will outline the approach, how Alexion selected its platform of choice, and lessons learned hydrating the data lake and providing data assets to the various functions across our enterprise.
The applications of molecular profiling technologies including next-generation sequencing in translational oncology offer unprecedented opportunities to discover new drug targets and biomarkers as well as to understand tumor biology. Ronghua Chen of Merck plans to explore the complexities of oncology data sets and highlight an integrated scientific informatics approach in analyzing data and supporting translational research.
Chris Lunt, NIH’s All of Us Research Program, will describe the program’s mission and objectives, current status, and plans for national launch and beyond. He will also share his vision of the All of Us ecosystem and the policies and business models necessary to ensure the long term success of the program and of the field of precision medicine more generally.
How does an organization manage its distributed scientific data to ensure it is FAIR—findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable? Jennifer Turcotte, Genentech, will explore the challenges of storing, accessing, managing and analyzing 100s of TBs of distributed data. The solution must have querying capabilities, high-performance access and history/lineage of data changes and analyses performed. How does one even begin to assess or implement the newer models and approaches without over-architecting a solution that can’t be used or managed? Turcotte has a suggestion.
One of the final panels of the event is a not-to-be-missed feast of trends and predictions moderated by Chris Dwan, a senior technologist and independent consultant, and featuring Patricia Kovatch, Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Saira Kazmi, The Jackson Laboratory; Annerose Berndt, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; and Aaron Gardner, BioTeam. The panelists will digest the event, taking questions online before and during the panel. Each panelist will provide a short presentation on Security/Privacy, Multi-Cloud Strategy, Data Architecture, and DevOps. We will close with a “lightning round,” in which panelists will summarize the major take-home messages from the conference in a succinct and tweetable format.
Plenary Program
We won’t be staying in the session rooms though. It’s the 25th anniversary of Tri-Con, and Leroy Hood and David Haussler, both of whom had a seminal role in the human genome project, will give plenary addresses. Hood’s career has been spent chasing the advice of his mentor William J. Dreyer: “If you want to practice biology, do it on the leading edge, and if you want to be on the leading edge, invent new tools for deciphering biological information.” And he’s done that over a rich and innovative career. Now Hood is pioneering new approaches to P4 medicine—medicine that is predictive, personalized, preventative, and participatory. Most recently, has embarked on creating a P4 pilot project on 108 well individuals, hoping to create a new healthcare discipline termed scientific wellness.
Haussler has built his career advocating and creating avenues for open science. As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, his team posted the first publicly available computational assembly of the human genome sequence on the Internet on July 7, 2000. He’s subsequently been part of the creation of the UCSC Genome Browser, the Ensembl platform, the CGHub database to hold NCI’s cancer genome data, and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
Also on the plenary agenda: Sara Radcliffe, president & CEO of the California Life Sciences Association, will give a state of the industry report on cancer research. And a panel of industry leaders will participate in a lightning round of presentations on emerging and hot technologies in molecular medicine. Each will present a clinical problem and how new technologies are helping us solve it.
Editor’s Note: The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference is produced by Cambridge Healthtech Institute, the parent company of Bio-IT World. Tri-Con will take place February 11-16, 2018; San Francisco, Calif. For more details, see: http://www.triconference.com/