Year In Review: 2017 Conferences, Discussions, Awards
December 19, 2017 | This year featured several conferences hosted by Cambridge Healthtech Institute, the parent company of Bio-IT World. These events covered a wide range of content that focused on bringing members of the biotech, next generation sequencing, IT, and personalized medicine communities to come together to promote innovation at the intersection between biology and technology. Here's a look back at some of the stories from 2017 covering those important discussions and groundbreaking news.
--The Editors
A Retrospective Of The 2017 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo
The 16th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo took place this year in Boston. Here are a few of the things that were discussed on the exhibit floor and in conference sessions. Highlights include Luminata, a new product ACD/Labs introduced in March; Stacey Gabriel, Director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute, who spoke about infrastructure requirements and how they have been changing in relation to the Broad’s work in genomics; and Diane Pacheco, information security officer for IT at The Jackson Laboratory, who spoke about why selecting a cloud service provider that you can trust is one of the most important decisions you can make when addressing the security of your company. Read more
Bio-IT World Announces 2017 Best Practices Awards Winners
The winners of the 2017 Best Practices Awards were announced during a keynote session at the 16th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Entries from Maccabi Healthcare System, Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, Allotrope Foundation, Earlham Institute, Biomedical Imaging Research Services Section (BIRSS), and Alexion Pharmaceuticals were honored. Read more
FAIR Hacking: Bio-IT World Hosts Its First Hackathon
A new addition to the 16th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo was the Bio-IT Hackathon, a competition focusing on FAIR data, data that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Three teams completed the Bio-IT Hackathon, focusing on datasets from Clinvar, the Foundation Medicine dataset, and a personal dataset from 23andMe. Read more
Rafael Irizarry Announced As 2017 Benjamin Franklin Award Winner
Rafael Irizarry, of Harvard University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, was chosen as the 2017 laureate of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences. In his lecture at 16th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, Irizarry spoke about his collaborative efforts in Open Source Software and Educational Resources. Read more
From Black Hole To Data Big Bang: Open Patent Chemistry Pips 20 Million Structures
While companies have always been aware of the crucial importance of patent disclosures in the context of intellectual property (IP), appreciation of their value as a data source is slowly increasing in the academic biomedical sector, particularly for medicinal chemistry as applied to drug discovery. An overview of this area, along with some tips and tricks for exploitation, was presented at the 2017 Bio-IT World Conference and Expo. Read more
Building And Supporting Mobile Apps In The Cloud
Mobile application development is a term used to denote the act or process by which application software is developed for mobile devices and it is growing steadily and at a rapid pace. With the increase in the usage of cloud technology, mobile development is the need of the hour. Most of the major products now have mobile modules attached and sometimes even provided as incentive to increase their sales. Mobile development has also brought changes to project management methodology in organizations. Cohesiveness and synergy between various teams is now more visible than ever. This topic was covered extensively during the 16th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Read more
Renewed Attention Sees New Progress For Hepatitis B
In preparation for the 15th Annual Discovery on Target conference, the industry’s preeminent event on novel drug targets, Anjani Shah, Ph.D., a conference director at Cambridge Healthtech Institute, describes how the HBV field has seen increased attention from industry research in the past few years, influenced by the success of new hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapies. After scientists realized HCV could be cured, they turned their attention to hepatitis B, hoping to develop a cure for it also. Read more
News And Notes From The Leaders In Biobanking Congress 2017
The 9th annual Leaders in Biobanking Congress was held in Nashville, Tennessee. The conference featured lectures from prominent experts in the field of diagnostics and biobanking, and included discussions on topics of clinical research and precision medicine, which often go hand in hand. Read more
At Vanderbilt, NCI’s Cooperative Human Tissue Network Relies On Lean Principles For Efficiency
Kerry Wiles, a co-presenter at the 2017 Leaders in Biobanking Congress, discusses her role as the program director for the Cooperative Human Tissue Network (CHTN), Western Division at Vanderbilt University. Unlike tissue banks, the CHTN works prospectively with each investigator to tailor specimen acquisition and processing to meet their specific project requirements. Read more
Understand What I Mean, Not What I Say
In the field of biobanking, where it is common for biobanks to evolve for different purposes, in disparate locations, and with isolated informatics systems, it’s no surprise that communication within and across biobanks, even within one institution, is challenging and fraught with miscommunications. These topics and others were explored at the 2017 Leaders in Biobanking Congress. Read more
Observations On The Post-Mortem Tissue Donation Process For Biospecimen Research
Sarah Gray of the American Association of Tissue Banks is featured on this podcast from Cambridge Healthtech Institute in preparation for the Leaders in Biobanking Congress. Topics include expectations about the process of donating post-mortem tissue for biospecimen research, possible process improvements to better serve patients, and more. Read more